Our Patient Feedback Process

Feedback Process

As per the RACGP Standards for General Practice 5th edition: Patient feedback guide, we need to collect and analyse patient feedback as well as share with our patients and team what we learned and improved in our practice.1

Our practice decided to use the RACGP Questionnaire without any changes to the wording of questions, and including at least three questions under each theme, as per recommendations from the Standards for general practices, 5th edition: Patient feedback guide.2

The questionnaire was programmed into the Survey Monkey3 platform for electronic collection and response analysis, as recommended in the Patient feedback guide.3

We distributed the questionnaire in multiple versions including:
  • Sending every 5th patient an invitation email with the link to our online questionnaire after their appointment.
  • Providing printed copies at reception for patients wishing to use this format instead of online. Any completed questionnaires were then entered into the web-based questionnaire for analysis.

We needed a total of 174 questionnaires (30 per FTE GP)

And we collected a total of 180 questionnaires

References

References:

  1. Standards for general practices, 5th edition: Patient feedback guide. Page 3.

https://www.racgp.org.au/download/Documents/Standards/5th%20Edition/Patient-feedback-guide-RACGP-Standards-for-general-practices-5th-edition.pdf

  1. Standards for general practices, 5th edition: Patient feedback guide. Page 32. Appendix 2: The RACGP’s questionnaire: Using the RACGP questionnaire.

https://www.racgp.org.au/download/Documents/Standards/5th%20Edition/Patient-feedback-guide-RACGP-Standards-for-general-practices-5th-edition.pdf

  1. Standards for general practices, 5th edition: Patient feedback guide. Page 20: Technology to develop your own questionnaire, from WordStream Blog, “7 Best online survey tools”, which recommends as tool #1: Survey Monkey

https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2014/11/10/best-online-survey-tools

  1. Standards for general practices, 5th edition: Patient feedback guide. Page 11 & 16: Different versions and tools for questionnaires, which includes online, SMS, printed copy and others. And Page 20: Creating different versions of the RACGP’s questionnaire.

https://www.racgp.org.au/download/Documents/Standards/5th%20Edition/Patient-feedback-guide-RACGP-Standards-for-general-practices-5th-edition.pdf

What we learned from our patient feedback responses:

What we’re doing well:
  • Great service, friendly and competent staff
  • High standard quality and holistic care
  • 7am start
What we could improve:
  • Wait time to see Doctor and informing patients if there is a wait to see their Doctor
  • Doctor availability
  • Music in waiting room at times loud
  • Price list to be more visible at reception desk
  • Patient parking
  • Better communication to patients of our afterhours services
What we changed or put in place in response to patient feedback:
  • Reception team will call ahead, when reasonable, to advise patients of extensive wait times. If there is a 15-30minute wait, patients will be advised upon check-in
  • More copies of our Practice fees have been displayed in the waiting room
  • We have increased our GP FTE by approximately 1 FTE to help with wait times and availability
  • Afterhours details have been reworded on our website
We informed the practice team of our results and improvements by:
  • Email
We informed our patients of what we learned and what we’re doing about it by:
  • Adding a patient feedback category to our website