Overall rating of care | HQCA Focus

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Emergency Department

Overall rating of care

Patients’ average overall rating of experience with emergency department care (from worst care possible [0] to best care possible [100]). (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 “overall rating of care”

Surveying patients’ about their experiences in the emergency department provides a voice for patients about the quality of their care.

The HQCA asked emergency department patients:

  • Using any number from 0 to 10, where 0 is the worst care possible and 10 is the best care possible, what number would you use to rate your care during this emergency department visit?

Patients’ overall experience with their care is important to monitor because their experience is central to health system quality.

If patients at an emergency department consistently provide higher or lower overall ratings of care, it is an opportunity look at other patient experience survey results, like patients’ experience getting help with pain or experience with emergency department communication to help understand the factors that might be influencing how patients rate their experience. Patients time to see an emergency department doctor and total length of stay in the emergency department may also affect their overall experience.

Learn more about the value of patient experience in optimizing health system performance from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.

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 this dimension of quality: Acceptability.

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