Surveys in the Health Sector – Hospitals and Clinical Audit
The drive for greater accountability in the provision of healthcare and the desire for better patient involvement through systematic consultation means health professionals and managers are not just having to look at the result of surveys before taking decisions, but increasingly, to carry them out too. In turn, this is driving up the demand for tools like Snap that will simplify and automate the survey process.
In the UK, a ten-year plan has been published for the National Health Service in which patient involvement and accountability are key themes. Although the NHS originally operated as a single, national authority, reforms over the last decade have divided it into many smaller ‘trusts’, often based on a group of two or three hospitals, or a small healthcare area. It is these NHS Trusts that now provide day to day management and delivery of healthcare to the UK’s 60 million citizens.
The ten-year plan involved a survey of over 100,000 members of the public and became the blueprint for the subsequent Health and Social Care Act and NHS Reform Bill. These establish a duty on every trust to undertake regular patient/public participation as well as staff consultation exercises. Add to this, existing initiatives to measure clinical effectiveness through surveys and sample methods and it soon becomes clear that accurate, timely data and the need to collect and process it efficiently are a necessity for hospitals and other healthcare providers.
Snap helps to simplify the processes and make it easy to comply with the increased burden of consultation and reporting without the need to find significant additional resource
Where budgets and human resources are stretched, as they often are in healthcare delivery, Snap helps to simplify the processes and make it easy to comply with the increased burden of consultation and reporting without the need to find significant additional resource.
Case Study: Southampton NHS Trust finds Snap the best treatment for both consultation and clinical audit
Southampton University Hospitals NHS Trust started using Snapto collect and process clinical audit data several years ago and now uses the software for patient and employee surveys too. As one of Britain’s larger NHS trusts, the Trust is responsible for three hospitals caring for half a million people in the Southampton area. It also provides specialist services including neurosciences, cardiac and children's intensive care, to three million people living in central southern England and the Channel Islands.
Merrilyn Dracass, the Trust’s Clinical Effectiveness Team Manager has six analysts and auditors working principally on clinical audit as well as the Trust’s other survey activities. Clinical audit monitors the effectiveness of hospital treatment for individual patients, so that the achievement of clinical teams can be measured against national standards. It relies on collecting data about each operation or hospitalization, including the outcome, then reporting these on a regular basis.
Merrilyn explained: "We use Snapto provide us with data collection forms for clinical audit. The advantage is that as you set up the database, it is also setting up the data collection form. In most other systems you have to set up one, then the other. That takes time and increases error."
Snap automatically creates the data entry screens and validates the input
In addition, Snapautomatically creates the data entry screens and validates the input. "If we can enter the data straight from the case notes, we will but sometimes we need to go out to the medical records office or on the wards, and this is when having a printed form is useful, as we can fill in the form then key it in back in the office."
Snap also provides the capability to analyze the results and produce the specific reports required for clinical audit.
"Mostly, we produce percentages," said Merrilyn. "Clinical audit is all about standards and whether you meet those standards, so we don’t get into very complex statistics. We do a lot of cross-tabbing and filtering to pull out subgroups. This is done in Snapor by copying and pasting it into Excel. We avoid retyping anything: every time you retype you introduce a margin of error."
Patient consultation surveys are now coming to the fore at Southampton. In most cases, these are administered as self-completion questionnaires that patients complete while at one of the trust’s hospitals. "Using Snapwe can make them look quite attractive and user-friendly which is important for people filling in the form as it encourages them to complete it. We like the way you can tweak it to make it look pretty, such as adding shading or splitting up part of it to put it in columns."
To date, the Trust’s largest survey was the most recent staff survey. In the past, this was achieved by surveying a 10% sample of the 6,500 people who work for the Trust. Last year, the government produced guidance on the topics to cover, which increased the scope of the survey considerably. The research team decided to circulate the questionnaire to every employee. A well laid-out questionnaire was produced in Snap, printed and distributed. The data were entered and validated using the Snapkey entry module. The result was an encouraging 33% response, which stands up well against norms of 15-25% for self-completion surveys, especially among the ever-changing population of the teaching hospital.
Analysis requirements tend to be more complex on patient and staff surveys. Snap is used to do the heavy-duty analysis, then the findings are presented graphically either in Snapor in Microsoft Excel.
"The staff opinion survey had a large section of ratings, from ‘strongly agree to ‘strongly disagree’, and we were able to apply some weighting which gave us this great chart based on the means. It gives a good visual impact, because positive responses show above the axis and negative responses fall beneath," Merrilyn reported. As the results are sent to the relevant managers, it is vital that the facts about performance are communicated clearly as well as accurately.
"One of the most useful things is Snap’s ability to print out the questionnaire with the data in it is something we do on every project. We use it for an initial quick look at the data and we can send it to the person requesting the audit as it is easy to understand. They can then decide what additional analysis they would like to see. We use Snap90% of the time for our surveys and we have found it to be the most useful piece of software for clinical audit."
Summary - How Snap surveys can help
Snap provides a complete range of powerful tools covering every step of the survey process
Snap provides a complete range of powerful tools covering every step of the survey process, from designing the questionnaire or data collection form through to editing and cleaning the data and presenting the results.
As Southampton University Hospital’s Trust has discovered, Snap’s easy-to-use questionnaire design tool both saves time and reduces error by organizing the database in the background and taking care of the appearance of the questionnaire automatically while you concentrate on writing the questions.
It is full of handy features like the automatic report that puts the answers into the questionnaire that Merrilyn Dracass pointed out. Snap provides the flexibility to produce tables, charts and statistics within its analysis module, or move the data quickly and safely into other software packages for further treatment. And the same set of tools can be used to scan questionnaires for even greater efficiency, or deployed on web or intranet, or loaded onto handheld PDA data capture devices.
Where results will have to stand up to close scrutiny, as they do with employee or patient consultation surveys and clinical audit, it is easy to overlook the need for accuracy in the rush for efficiency. Relied on daily in thousands of situations, Snapnot only saves hours of effort every time it is used, it will deliver the results you need, accurately and reliably every time.