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Read the September 2007 Newsletter.

We are all back and a couple of partners even reported seeing some sunshine - Ireland has been great these last few weeks and temperatures at 3000 metres in Switzerland encourage short sleeves and severe ultra violent burns. It was not sunburn that gave me an insight into the Swiss medical system - I was only an observer as we arrived at one of Geneva's most upmarket independent hospitals with an A&E reception area looking like an 80's Holiday Inn but much quieter. I am not sure if anything as disruptive and upsetting for patients as an ambulance with its lights and noisy sirens would have been allowed. In and out though in under an hour including a test and a 10 minute session with the senior doctor on duty.

Not the UK A&E experience - once you get there of course. Our August blog postings feature a follow-up to an earlier piece on A&E closures and the fear of dying in the ambulance. Cue Private Eye cartoon showing ambulance and plaintive patient query - "are we nearly there yet?".

Other August postings if you missed them were about the difficulties of communication between commissioners and the voluntary organisations who will have more and more to do with the process of commissioning. We said "The lament 'They don't know how to buy and we don't know how to sell' expresses the frustration from a 3rd sector perspective."

The other August offering came from our web survey guru and associate Dan Wardle talking about the Picker approach to aspects of patient feedback.

Whatever the merits of one approach over another, there is nothing better than some challenging results from a patient or user survey challenging a pervailing professional orthodoxy to generate a decent row especially in the dead news days of August. This brings us back to Switzerland where Richard Eisler boss of an Internet price comparison site Comparis.ch is using user surveys (German only) - such as Wiedereintritts-, Infektions- und Fehlerraten in Schweizer Spitälern (readmission, infection and error rates in Swiss hospitals) and Patientenzufriedenheit in Schweizer Spitälern (patient satisfaction) to open up the closed world of the Swiss health system with predictable cries of outrage from the Swiss medical establishment.

http://www.comparis.ch/Krankenkassen/spitalfuehrer/dokument/Studie_Patientenzufriedenheit_WIF_2007_DE.pdf and http://www.comparis.ch/comparis/press/studien/kk/Studie_Patientenzufriedenheit_2007_DE.pdf

The head of the swiss hospitals association Charles Favre quoted below in an article from Le Matin dismissed the findings out of hand of a survey on readmission and infection rates and other medical errors:-

"Selon vous, l'enquête (survey) de Comparis ne vaut rien? (is worthless)
Les chiffres publiés n'ont aucune crédibilité. On parle d'erreurs médicales sans dire ce que c'est. On demande au patient d'établir lui-même son diagnostic... Ce n'est pas sérieux."

(Translation not really needed - as your French teacher should have told you, no one is a total beginner in French. You know all the words ending '-ation' and ones like credibility, errors/eurs etc). Actually he was challenged by another Swiss doctor from a patient safety institute pointing out that the hospitals themselves publish no data on this and even if they did, the data were not comparable since they were not standardised. So in a field where there is no data, the consumer opinion is the best source of information.

I think that the UK has moved on a bit from this scenario where consumer data is dismissed out of hand especially when it strays into 'technical' areas like infection. For a good discussion and good practice on the integration of consumer data with scientific research, look at the Food Standards Authority site ( www.food.gov.uk/science/surveys/foodsafety-nutrition-diet ) and at a paper by the think tank Demos (http://www.food.gov.uk/multimedia/pdfs/fsa061004b.pdf ).

 

Enjoy the autumn and keep filling in the satisfaction surveys - especially the ones we send you.