Introduction: The Press Ganey survey is a well-established metric for measuring hospital performance and patient satisfaction. We seek to evaluate satisfaction scores in patients seen in neurosurgical spine versus neurosurgical non-spine clinics.
Methods: 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 out of 100 for unpaired student t-test analysis. We identified 578 neurosurgical spine clinic patients and 1048 neurosurgical non-spine clinic patients.
Results: 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).
Conclusions: This study is the first to evaluate the relationship between neurosurgical spine versus non-spine clinic with regards to patient satisfaction. The spine clinic cohort reported less satisfaction than the non-spine 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.
Patient Care: We hope that our data will help us improve patient satisfaction in spine clinics and improve quality-based reimbursements/ metrics.
Learning Objectives: By the conclusion of this session, participants should be able to: 1) Describe the differences between satisfaction scores for spine versus non-spine neurosurgery clinics, 2) Describe the potential contributing factors for lower satisfaction scores in spine patients.
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