Patient Satisfaction and Press Ganey Scores for Spine Versus Nonspine Neurosurgery Clinics

Retrospective survey review.

We seek to evaluate satisfaction scores in patients seen in neurosurgical spine versus neurosurgical nonspine clinics.

The Press Ganey survey is a well-established metric for measuring hospital performance and patient satisfaction. These measures have important implications in setting hospital policy and guiding interventions to improve patient perceptions of care.

Retrospective Press Ganey survey review was performed to identify patient demographics and patient visit characteristics from January 1st, 2012 to October 10th, 2017 at Stanford Medical Center. A total of 40 questions from the Press Ganey survey were investigated and grouped in categories addressing physician and nursing care, personal concerns, admission, room, meal, operating room, treatment and discharge conditions, visitor accommodations and overall clinic assessment. Raw ordinal scores were converted to continuous scores of 100 for unpaired student t test analysis. We identified 578 neurosurgical spine clinic patients and 1048 neurosurgical nonspine clinic patients.

Spine clinic patients reported lower satisfaction scores in aggregate (88.2 vs. 90.1; P=0.0014), physician (89.5 vs. 92.6; P=0.0002) and nurse care (91.3 vs. 93.4; P=0.0038), personal concerns (88.2 vs. 90.9; P=0.0009), room (81.0 vs. 83.1; P=0.0164), admission (90.8 vs. 92.6; P=0.0154) and visitor conditions (87.0 vs. 89.2; P=0.0148), and overall clinic assessment (92.9 vs. 95.5; P=0.005).

This study is the first to evaluate the relationship between neurosurgical spine versus nonspine clinic with regards to patient satisfaction. The spine clinic cohort reported less satisfaction than the nonspine cohort in all significant questions on the Press Ganey survey. Our findings suggest that efforts should be made to further study and improve patient satisfaction in spine clinics.

Level III.