14 DAY TRIAL // A new research carried out by a team from the University of Bristol, tried to find out what would be the most reliable way of assessing the performances of doctors and practices, focusing on whether patient surveys are reliable or not.
The survey concluded that it is better to ask patients about their actual experiences of care rather than demand satisfaction ratings, when evaluating the performance of general practices.
The researchers used a mathematical model for analyzing data from 4,573 patients, who had seen 150 different doctors at 27 general practices in England.
The results showed that specific questions about access to care and other patients' experiences were more accurate than questions about their general satisfaction, measuring practice and doctor performance more precisely.
The explanation is rather simple, it is because people perceive things differently and when errors also slip in, the surveys become unreliable, according to the authors.
Also, there seem to be variations in responses, depending on age, sex and ethnicity, but after adjusting the results, very little difference to practice's scores of ranking of the individual practices remained.
Normally, for evaluating the performance of a doctors or a practice, specialists use patient surveys, but this new research questions the reliability of the surveys that only assess for overall satisfaction.
And as in the United Kingdom, there are several general practices that receive a part of their income based on survey scores, being very precise becomes even more important.
Making sure that the responses given by the patients reflect the actual performance is very important, still this is one of the very few studies that have focused on the matter.
As a conclusion to the study, the authors support the idea that questions about specific care experiences represent a more reliable and discriminating measure of a practice's performance, that questions about general satisfaction, and call for larger studies to test their findings.