Patient Relations Measurement and Reporting to Improve Quality and Safety: Lessons from a Pilot Project.

Area of Science:

• Healthcare Quality Improvement
• Patient Experience Measurement
• Health Services Research

Background:

• Effective patient relations are crucial for enhancing patient experience and ensuring safe healthcare delivery.
• Ontario's recent policy changes mandate increased accountability for healthcare organizations in patient relations.
• Health Quality Ontario's mandate expanded to include measuring and reporting on patient relations across various care sectors.

Purpose of the Study:

• To validate standardized patient relations indicators and data submission processes.
• To develop prototype reporting for patient relations in hospital, home, community, and long-term care sectors.
• To support improved patient care through reliable measurement and reporting.

Main Methods:

• Conducted an environmental scan and expert consultations, including patients and caregivers, to identify potential indicators.
• Utilized a modified Delphi process with a provincial advisory group to prioritize five key patient relations indicators.
• Validated selected indicators using facility-level data from 29 healthcare organizations for fiscal year 2015-2016.

Main Results:

• Twenty-nine of 34 participating organizations successfully submitted patient relations indicator data.
• Over 90% of required data was accessible through existing systems.
• "Care and treatment" emerged as the most frequent complaint category across all three health sectors.

Conclusions:

• The pilot confirmed the value of measuring patient relations and reporting feedback for system-level improvements.
• Recommended phased implementation to allow organizations to standardize data collection and align with provincial measures.
• Initiated voluntary data submission with the inclusion of "complaints acknowledged" in Quality Improvement Plans starting fiscal year 2018-2019.