New VGH Patient Satisfaction Results

Monroe, WA – Valley General Hospital’s mission is to provide East Snohomish County residents with quality medical care. As a way to measure the care our patients receive, we participate in patient satisfaction surveys. Our patients are asked how they would rate the services they received.
Survey results are gathered and assessed by clinical staff and hospital administrators. Valley General strives to continually improve on every front. VGH received patient satisfaction survey results for the period September – November, 2005. The following points are notable:

Inpatient – The overall satisfaction, based on a scale of 0 to 5:

• Medical Patients  –  4.21
• Surgical Patients  –  4.23
• Birth Center  –  4.00

For the Birth Center, the hospital did better than the Jackson data base on all questions except ‘how well patient’s pain was managed’ and ‘overall satisfaction’.

Great progress was made for all inpatients by the Admitting staff (4.42), with two consecutive reporting periods of improvement.

All patient types combined resulted in 92% being either very or completely satisfied. That is up from 83% last quarter.

Emergency – Overall satisfaction improved this quarter. VGH seems to be consistent when combining ‘completely’ and ‘very satisfied’ at 77 - 78% each quarter. VGH ranked at the 32nd percentile of the Jackson ED data base.

VGH is up from 89% to 93% of staff checking identifiers to provide safe patient care. VGH improved statistically significantly in the ‘total amount of time spent in the ED from arrival to discharge or admittance to the hospital’ to 3.93 from 3.44.

Outpatient – Results were broken into three categories for overall patient satisfaction as follows:

• Outpatient Surgery  –  4.43
• Radiology  –   4.00
• Laboratory  –  4.14

These results compared to the Jackson data base are:

• Outpatient Surgery  –  44th percentile
• Radiology  –  1st percentile
• Laboratory  –  2nd percentile

Top predictors of ‘overall satisfaction’ that VGH can improve on are:

• How comfortable staff made the patient feel
• How confident patient feels they get proper care
• How well staff answer questions

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