Three tips for gathering and actioning patient feedback
Patient feedback is very important for private general practice. Not only is it an important element of the annual appraisal process which all GPs are required to undertake, it is a great way to understand your patients and make improvements to your service. These improvements can help to maintain current patients and attract new patients to your practice.
Patient feedback is important for private general practice. It's a great way to understand how your patients experience your service and informs how best to improve.
Here are our our top three tips.
1. Use online software to build your questionnaire
Avoid paper forms. Response rates are low and lots of administrative time is required to collate and store this feedback.
We recommend an online questionnaire builder which will allow you to create a professional personalised patient survey to send to your patients.
Typeform
Our recommended platform to use is Typeform.
Typeform is a user-friendly website which allows you to build and customise forms, surveys and quizzes. You can start with a free account to get used to the software and then upgrade to a paid account when you are ready to start using it with your patients.
There are a range of pre-built templates for you to use or you can build your own from scratch. Select from many different question types such as open text, rating scales, picture choices and rankings.
Typeform also has logic options, meaning you can show patients different questions or end screens depending on the answers they give.
When building your questionnaire, we’d recommend including questions on the following topics:
The booking process (appointment availability, ease of booking)
The practice (the look, condition and welcome they received)
The consultation (how long they had to wait, the knowledge of the doctor, any procedures carried out)
Communications they had before and after their consultation
We would recommend adding the question ‘how likely are you to recommend us to a family or friend who needed one of our services?’. This question, when asked on a scale of 0-10 provides a net promoter score (NPS.)
NPS is a widely used metric which is used universally to measure customer experience. A simple calculation can be made based on the responses to this question which categorises patients as promoters, passives or detractors.
You can use your NPS score to compare your patient feedback against others within the industry and to also monitor your patient satisfaction month on month.
2. Send to patients via email or text following their consultation
Your highest chance of feedback will be to send a quick personalised form via text message or email as soon as they leave the consultation. Typeform allows a link to be created which can also be customised to reflect your company name or the questionnaire.
Send your patient feedback questionnaire electronically
This allows patients to respond at their leisure rather than having to do so while still in the clinic.
If possible, automate these emails or texts
Depending on the software you are using, these communications can be automated so they are sent to patients without needing to do this manually.
Send the feedback the day after the consultation
The reason for this is that for some patients, their consultation may have been worrying, painful or has resulted in further investigations. It can therefore be insensitive to ask for feedback straight after the appointment and waiting until the following day allows some time to pass but the feedback will still be accurately answered.
3. Action your patient feedback and tell patients what you've done
When a patient completes your questionnaire, their responses will be stored in typeform. You can download responses as a spreadsheet at any time and you will also be able to view them through a report.
The dynamic report will automatically update to include any new responses that come in and the link to this report can be shared with any internal team members.
Extra tip
Even though feedback will be anonymous, you may want to ask the patients which healthcare professional they saw so you can begin to build up a bank of feedback for each of your doctors.
This can not only help with their appraisals, but ensures you are giving praise to those who are getting great feedback and addressing any recurring negative feedback where appropriate.
It can be useful to action feedback on ‘you said, we did’ basis where possible.
Examples
if you receive feedback saying the waiting room chair was very uncomfortable, you may want to consider changing it.
if you are told it would be nice to have had access to a drink, you could look at adding a water cooler to reception.
Any feedback you act upon should be communicated to people using the service.
Any changes you have put in place can be communicated via a monthly newsletter, discussed on your social media channels or added to a poster in the waiting room.
Want to give typeform a try?
If you are ready to create your first typeform, access the link below where you can register and get set up. You will need to enter your details to create an account, read and agree to the terms of service and activate your account via an email sent to your inbox.
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Do you have any further tips on patient feedback which you’d like to share? We’d love to hear from you, get in touch with us via our contact us page.
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