Table 2.

Areas to address in administering patient experience surveys in clinical practice

Patients	Survey needs to capture what is meaningful and relevant to patient experience. Purpose of survey needs to be clearly communicated to patients. Survey needs to be specific to particular patient contexts (eg, culture and language) or incorporate diverse perspectives. Sampling strategy needs to ensure representativeness of patients to fit survey purpose and generate meaningful findings. Interpretation of questions may vary by patients (eg, health literacy and background). Survey administration needs to be done in a setting and format that is conducive to patient participation. Ensure confidentiality and privacy of data and assure patients that their data will be anonymised and safely stored.
Providers	Providers need to see the value of patient survey to their work: What matters to clinicians? What information will be relevant to their clinical practice? What is feasible to achieve? Purpose of survey needs to be made clear to providers.
Practices	Practice requires a culture of quality improvement that integrates patient surveys as part of core business. Practices need to have sense of ownership of survey process – codesign must take practice needs into account and have benefit for practice improvement. Practice needs to have clear purpose for doing the survey, or if being coordinated by an external entity, then have that purpose be made clear to them. Practices are resistant to surveys if their purpose is solely for performance reporting (eg, connected to punitive sanctions). Quality improvement is a better lever for change. If surveys are done too often or concurrently with other research or quality improvement activities, staff will be at risk of survey fatigue. Adequate resources need to be in place for survey and implementation: Skilled workforce to carry out surveys. IT systems in place for management and use of data. Dedicated time and space. The survey needs to fit with provider schedule and workflow. Providers need to be upskilled in all aspects of patient survey and implementation of findings (eg, recruitment, administration, data management, analysis and interpretation). Providers need to be able to easily access and extract data from patient surveys. Dissemination of survey findings needs to reach a wide and diverse audience, in a timely fashion.
System	Nationally, there needs to be a stronger culture of quality in the Australian health system. The system needs to commit to building an evidence base on how to use patient surveys for QI in general practice. For example: partnership with academia. There is a need for strong governance and accountability framework for overseeing patient surveys at national and regional levels. Implementing surveys will require a communication strategy so that all stakeholder groups are continuously engaged and understand the purpose and functioning of this work. There needs to be a unified system of IT for data sharing or aggregation at regional levels. Surveys will require committed and long-term funding and resources to enable practices to continue this work. There needs to be partnership and alignment with PHNs and other entities to help support and operationalise this work.

PHNs, primary health networks.