Summaries of research articles representing qualitative and quantitative designs

Summaries of research articles representing qualitative and quantitative designs

Patient Satisfaction Surveys are here to Stay

Introduction

Malott DL. and Fulton BF. researched on statistics of the data needed for patient satisfaction survey. The article was published in Emergency Physicians Monthly in November 2010. The paper argues on quantitative aspects of data collection in a health survey. The research targets randomly selected population. Randomized data collection is a tool for evading research biases. The researchers are defending patient satisfaction surveys on the basis of their importance. They suggest that the government should make policies about the domain. The article is an example of quantitative research design.

Problem Statement

Healthcare provision facilities pay more attention towards survival of a patient than his satisfaction. Patients usually lack trust in the healthcare provider. The surveyors do not assemble data in a statistical order. The data does not fulfill requirements of the research.

Statement of Purpose

The hospitals and other clinical setups should be paying appropriate attention to patient's satisfaction about the care he gets. The data shall be used to improve patient care. The author elaborates the specifications for the data needed for the case study.

Study Methods

The study uses survey data from the emergency department (ED) to gauge patients' satisfaction. The plan of the survey is to collect a data which is both specific for ED, and applicable to other hospital departments. The researcher has to test the data parameters. The data parameters are; pilot testing, population and sample size, data trends, benchmarking, and data distribution and information assessment (White, 1999). Independent survey companies are used for data collection. The samples are selected randomly and specifically from the emergency department. The in-patients are not included in the study.

Key Findings

The selected questions in the survey are precise and succinct. The researcher performs pilot-testing of the survey questions. Pilot-testing ensures the validity and reliability of a survey. The article identifies a proper definition for population and sample. The researchers make changes to population and sample definitions to achieve better samples, which represent a significant population.

The article describes appropriate sample size for both large and small emergency departments (www.pressganey.com). The analysts assess data periodically to access maximum population. The investigator compares results of patient data to a reference data. Data distribution represents the type of patients who have responded to the survey. Most of the time unsatisfied or angry patients refuse to respond. Such data ...