Title: Staff experience: a fresh perspective for the Patient Experience.
Supervisor: Pr Philippe MICHEL and Dr Julie HAESEBAERT.
Abstract:
The patient experience, defined as the sum of all interactions, shaped by an organization’s culture, that influence patient perceptions, across the continuum of care, has been recognised as a major lever for improving healthcare systems. Patient experience measurement and evaluation programmes have been nationally implemented in several countries, as the “e-Satis” program in France. However, these programmes have come up against criticism from the three main actors in the healthcare system: patients and their relatives (difficulty in reporting on their experience), staff (lack of involvement and practical indications on how to improve their practice) and institutions (complexity of transforming quantitative results into operational strategies).
The objective of this thesis is to propose an approach to improve the patient experience at the level of an academic hospital federation that uses and completes the existing program to better respond to the needs and expectations of the various stakeholders. Three levels of studies are proposed: analysis of patient comments from e-Satis, a survey of professionals to gather their feelings during their interactions with patients and the comparison of the perceptions of patients and staff on their key interactions.
The applied approach allows - through a semi-automated analysis that combines linguistic expertise and automated processing by software – to translate comments into measurable and comparable data at different scales (for example: institutions, departments). This method was applied to 10 061 comments from patients (from e-Satis) and 511 from staff and provides decision support by classifying the themes into four categories. The cross-referencing of patient and professional results allowed the identification of convergences and divergences of perceptions between the two populations and thus to target the most important and relevant improvement actions.
This thesis provides an approach to the patient experience which firstly allows to report on patients' experiences, to identify operational actions to improve their experience, and to enhance the use of national systems. Secondly, the inclusion of staff allows to identify their needs and to compare the perceptions of the two populations to inform and support the quality improvement strategies of health care institutions.
Key words: Patient Experience; Staff Experience; Patient-reported Experience Measures; Healthcare quality improvement.
