Impact of patient characteristics on the Canadian Patient Experiences Survey-Inpatient Care: survey analysis from an academic tertiary care centre

Objective: To determine the role of patient demographics, care domains and self-perceived health status in the analysis and interpretation of results from the Canadian Patient Experience Survey-Inpatient Care.

Design: Cross-sectional survey.

Setting: Single large Canadian two campus tertiary care academic centre.

Participants: Random sampling of hospital patients postdischarge.

Intervention and main outcome measures: Logistic regression models were developed to analyse topbox scoring on four questions of global care (rate experience, recommend hospital, rate hospital, overall helped). Means of each composite domain were correlated to the four overall scores at the patient level to determine Spearman's rank correlation coefficients which were plotted against the overall (hospital) domain score for the key driver analysis.

Results: Topbox scoring was decreased with worse degrees of perceived physical and mental health in all four global questions (p<0.05). Female gender and higher levels of education were associated with worse scoring on rate experience, recommend hospital and rate hospital (p<0.001). Whereas there was a significant difference between hospital departments in unadjusted measures, these differences were no longer evident after adjustment with patient covariates. Key driver analysis identified person-centred care, care transition and the domain related to emergency admission as areas of highest potential for improvement.

Conclusions: Global measures of overall care are influenced by patient-perceived physical and mental health. Caution should be exercised in using patient-satisfaction surveys to compare performance between different healthcare provision entities, as apparent differences could be explained by variation in patient mix rather than variation in performance.