Healthcare Areas
Also in this section
- Primary Healthcare
- Clinical care
- Delivery of care
- Patient experience
- Patients’ experience with family doctors’ listening
- Patients’ rating of family doctor’s explanations
- Patients’ experience with appointment length
- Patients’ experience with family doctor’s respect
- Patients’ experiences with their doctor involving them in care decisions
- Patient experience with care coordination
- Patient experience with family doctor availability
- Patients’ overall experience with their family doctor
- Emergency Department
- Wait times
- EMS response time for life-threatening events
- Time spent by EMS at hospital
- Patient time to see an emergency doctor
- Patient emergency department total length of stay (LOS)
- Length of time emergency department patients wait for a hospital bed after a decision to admit
- Time to get X-ray completed
- Emergency department volumes
- Delivery of care
- Hospital patients who require an alternate level of care
- Length of patient hospital stay compared to Canadian average length of hospital stay
- Patients who left without being seen (LWBS) by an emergency department doctor
- Patients waiting in the emergency department for a hospital bed
- Hospital occupancy
- Patient experience
- Patient experience with staff introductions
- Patient experience with communication about follow-up care
- Patient experience with help for pain
- Communication with patients about possible side effects of medicines
- Patient reason for emergency department visit
- Overall patient experience with emergency department communication
- Overall rating of care
- Highlight Meaningful Changes
- Wait times
- Hospital Care
- Delivery of care
- Patient experience
- Overall rating of care
- Patient experience with talking with staff about help needed at home
- Patient experience with staff helping with pain
- Patient experience with information about their condition and treatment
- Patient experience with involvement in care decisions
- Patient experience with communication with nurses and doctors
- Client experience
- Client experience with courtesy and respect
- Client experience with listening
- Client experience with reaching their case manager
- Client experience with case manager (help with community services)
- Client experience with care plan involvement
- Client experience with care plan meeting needs
- Client experience with independence (home set-up)
- Client experience with independence (staff encouragement)
- Client experience with personal care staff capability
- Client experience with communication about a visit cancellation
- Client experience with pain management
- Client experience with reviewing medications
- Client experience with help to stay at home
- Client experience with family doctor being informed
- Client overall care experience
- Delivery of care
- Resident experience
- Resident experience with decision-making
- Resident experience with food
- Resident experience with getting their healthcare needs met
- Resident experiences with sharing concerns
- Resident experiences with feeling safe
- Resident experiences with independence
- Resident experiences with rules
- Resident experiences with activities
- Resident overall experience
- Family experience
- Family experience with courtesy and respect
- Family experience with decision-making
- Family experience with food
- Family experience with healthcare services and treatments
- Family experience with resident cared for by the same staff
- Presence of a resident and family council
- Family experience with sharing concerns
- Family experience with staffing
- Family overall rating of care
- Clinical care
- Symptoms of delirium
- Mood worsened from symptoms of depression
- Behavioural symptoms improved
- Inappropriate use of antipsychotics
- Worsening pain
- New pressure ulcers
- Physical restraint use
- Unexplained weight loss
- Cognitive performance
- Frailty and risk of health decline
- Potential depression
- Activities of daily living
- Delivery of care
- Family experience
- Family experience with courtesy and respect
- Family experience with decision-making
- Family experience with food
- Family experience with healthcare services and treatments
- Family experience with resident cared for by the same staff
- Family experience of resident and family council
- Family experience with sharing concerns
- Family experience with staffing
- Family experience with staff responsiveness
- Family overall rating of care
Emergency Department
Communication with patients about possible side effects of medicines
Patients’ overall experience with communication about medicines, specifically possible side effects. (see data dictionary)
What do you see?
- Are there any trends over time at the emergency department(s) where you work or would be most likely to visit?
- Are there differences in patient experiences between hospitals of the same type (e.g., Large Urban)?
Why is it meaningful?
- Is there a relationship between this data and another healthcare area?
- Do you see successes worth highlighting or opportunities for improvement?
Understanding “communication with patients about possible side effects of medicines”
Surveying patients about their experiences in the emergency department provides a voice for patients about the quality of their care. A key part of their experience can be determined by communication about their medicine, specifically, possible side effects of their medicines.
The HQCA asked emergency department patients, who were given medicine, two questions about their experience.
The questions were:
- Before giving you any new medicine, did the doctors or nurses describe possible side effects to you in a way you could understand?
- Before giving you pain medicine, did the doctors and nurses describe possible side effects in a way you could understand?
For each question, the respondents could choose “yes, definitely”, “yes, somewhat”, or “no”. The responses “yes, definitely” or “yes, somewhat” are included in the chart above.
Many patients receiving emergency care are provided with medicine. When used correctly, medicine can help patients feel better or even save their lives. However, there are safety risks if patients don’t know about side effects. To take a more active role in their medication safety, it is important for patients to understand the possible side effects of the medicine they are taking.
If there is effective communication about medicine, patients’ overall rating of their emergency department experience may improve.
Understanding the HQCA’s emergency department patient experience survey
Every two weeks, the HQCA conducts a telephone survey with a random sample of patients from each of the 16 emergency departments reported on this website. The patient input collected in the surveys is then analyzed by the HQCA and the results of the question above, and six others, are uploaded to this website every quarter (three months). See our About the Data page to learn more about the survey methodology.
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Results for November 2019 to July 2020 are not available for the University of Alberta Hospital and the Stollery Children’s Hospital.
Alberta Quality Matrix for Health
The Health Quality Council of Alberta uses the Alberta Quality Matrix for Health as a way of organizing information and thinking around the complexity of the healthcare system. This measure can be used as input to assess the emergency department’s performance in these dimensions of quality: Acceptability and Safety.