Surveying young patients

Abstract

The East of England Ambulance Service NHS Trust (the Trust) was keen to engage young patients and to encourage them to give feedback about the service they had received. The standard Trust satisfaction survey was modified for use with young patients, and this had the effect of increasing the response rate from this patient group by 8%, and increasing the percentage of young patients aged 5-10 years completing the survey themselves by 29%. The vast majority of parents/guardians were happy for the Trust to survey their child, but the age of the child affected to whom they would like the survey sent. The Trust subsequently altered patient survey practice to write to parents/guardians of patients aged <12 years and directly to all patients aged > or = 12 years. https://emj.bmj.com/content/27/3/221. This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/emj.2008.065615