Satisfaction guaranteed? a patient survey of the anaesthesia service

Approximately 84% of all patient journeys within our hospital involve an anaesthetist at some stage. Assessing patient satisfaction with anaesthesia services has proved difficult for various reasons. However, revalidation will require anaesthetists to obtain specific feedback from their patients. The Royal College of Anaesthetists states that ‘Reliable patient feedback will be a valuable indicator and source of supporting information of certain professional skills for appraisal and revalidation’ [1]. Due to the nature of our involvement with patients, feedback is difficult to obtain. We also feel that for each anaesthetist individually to collect their own patient feedback data would be extremely time-consuming and fraught with potential inaccuracy. We planned to devise a system where individual anaesthetists in our department would be able to obtain their own personalised patient feedback data from our large patient database. Our hospital has an ongoing audit system in place whereby every anaesthetic administered is recorded and tagged with a clinician specific code. Data collected includes patient demographics, procedural and anaesthesia detail and is held on a central departmental database. Using this database, we obtained details of 147 patients over a 1-month period. We excluded emergency episodes, obstetrics, paediatrics, electro-convulsive therapy and pregnancy terminations, as we felt that obtaining feedback from these groups would need to be more specific. We based our survey on the validated Heidelberg peri-anaesthetic questionnaire, as this provides a broader assessment of anaesthetic care than the Consultation And Relational Empathy (CARE) questionnaire [2, 3]. This series of questions permits assessment of the patient’s experience with various facets of the anaesthesia service. We selected 16 questions from this survey and posted them out to the previously identified patients. Before this, we performed a pilot on 40 post-surgical inpatients, which verified that the questionnaire was easily understood by our patients. Patients were asked to rate their agreements with the selected statements with a response: strongly agree; agree; disagree; or strongly disagree (Table 1). There was a 63% response rate. Analysis demonstrated that patients were generally satisfied with communication, the recovery from the anaesthetic and they trusted the anaesthetic staff. However, there were areas in which patients appeared dissatisfied: 45% stated that they experienced pain at the surgical site on waking; 21% stated that felt sick; 27% stated that hoarseness or sore throat was a problem; 36% felt cold or shivery; and 39% stated they were thirsty. We are currently addressing the areas requiring improvement from this initial dataset. We are planning to tag each questionnaire with clinician codes to obtain individualised feedback for each consultant anaesthetist in the department. With revalidation looming, we believe that this questionnaire holds the key to meaningful feedback data from our patients. No external funding and no competing interests declared. Published with permission from hospital Caldicott guardian.