A new paper reviews what types of patient experience feedback are currently available, categorising them by their characteristics in order to better understand their roles in quality improvement.

Patient experience feedback in UK hospitals undertook a scoping review of the types of feedback currently available to hospital staff.

Thirty-seven feedback types were sorted into 12 characteristics and then four categories to help understand the potential use within quality improvement.

The four categories were: hospital‐initiated (validated) quantitative surveys, for example the NHS Adult Inpatient Survey; patient‐initiated qualitative feedback, for example Twitter comments; hospital‐initiated qualitative feedback, for example Experience Based Co-Design; and other, for example the Friends and Family Test.

Of those routinely collected, the authors found few elicit ‘ready‐to‐use’ data.

Those that do elicit data are most suitable for measuring accountability, not for informing ward‐based improvement.

They concluded if feedback is to be used more frequently within quality improvement more attention must be paid to obtaining and making available the most appropriate types.

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© 2019 The Authors Health Expectations published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd