Satisfaction
Posted: Wed 8 August, 2018 Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Domestic, Getting Organised, Health, Thoughts, Weirdness 5 Comments »Yesterday, I had a (non-urgent, outpatients) appointment at my local hospital. All went well, and I’ll be returning occasionally over the next few months. Which is all as expected.
What was less expected was a text message today from the hospital, containing a “Patient Satisfaction” survey.
The first question? “Would you recommend this hospital to your friends and family?“, and a set of five options for the likelihood of doing such a thing.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I really don’t recommend that my friends or family visit a hospital. Certainly when none of them are even in that hospital’s catchment area.
What kind of cretin comes up with this shit? Even more relevantly, what kind of cretin approves this shit?
And if I’d been – for example – visiting the Oncology department (I wasn’t) for treatment, I wonder if I would have received the same survey?
But why are they doing it?
My guess… because when the hospital have a complaint from someone, they then have real figures to prove that x% of people don’t agree, and real figures of long-term ‘satisfaction’ to give to whoever regulates/inspects them.
Also, I suspect that no-one is going to rate things other than well as they will think (rightly or wrongly) that the rating will go on their medical records and will count against them next time they need to go there for treatment. Or, stored and used if one ever has the need to make a complaint.
It seems to me that things have gone so far down the madness route now that one has to step back and consider WHY things are being done/asked/not done, rather than engage with the madness.
And hope that your need to visit resolves OK.
“Yeah, probably” to all that.
Thing is, that was the *only* question in the survey. There was nothing about the visit itself, or my feelings and experience about it. Those I would’ve happily answered, and been generally positive about.
But no, the first and only question was “Would you recommend to friends and family?” Which doesn’t even give any kind of useful feedback metric for dealing with complaints etc.
Depends on how crass your measures are, and how badly you abuse your ‘statistics’ 😉
Following several surreal similar experiences in recent months, and discovering much more about how feedback operates, and the control others have over it, I now have a policy of not giving any kind of feedback to anybody.
I don’t usually give feedback either, the options are never what I want to say. I did, however, today when I renewed my voter registration – the section on suggestions of changes to the voting system (electronic voting, having to provide ID, compulsory voting etc) were marked by whether I’d be more or less likely to vote if they were introduced. Since I’d already said that I always vote, *more* wasn’t possible, as I said in the space for comments. A couple of them, I said, might well make me more likely to vote against a government that introduced them. And I suggested an approval rating instead, if they really wanted an opinion.