Communication is key to happy patients
People buying health insurance have high expectations of the care they should receive, so their feedback is valuable in helping improve our service, writes Bupa’s Tricia Carley-White.
Our ambition at Bupa is to be the world’s most customer-centric healthcare company. This means having a commitment to excellent customer experience, through great service and value, frictionless access and quality healthcare.
We’ve set ourselves a performance indicator of achieving a net promoter score (NPS) of 80, in line with the most customer-centric organisations in the world. NPS is the likelihood of our customers recommending Bupa from -100 to +100.
We have a team focused on clinical quality and part of their job is to examine all the feedback we receive, both good and bad, to look at ways we can improve the patient journey.
To help us make sure we are on target, we gather feedback from Bupa patients in a number of ways. Depending on the care that they have had, people are sent our hospital inpatient survey, outpatient survey or GP appointment feedback survey to complete afterwards.
Information from the six-month period from November 2022 to April 2023 shows that those participating in our hospital inpatient survey gave their hospital an NPS of 80 and those completing our outpatient survey scored Bupa 81.
High scores
These high scores tell us that patients would recommend their hospital and Bupa to a friend or colleague.
Where the outpatient survey respondents referred to ‘staff’ in their feedback, 93% of these comments were positive.
If we look at the outpatient survey in more detail, we can see what patients were most satisfied with in their experiences with their consultant or other healthcare professional.
93% said they were extremely satisfied with the knowledge and expertise of their consultant.
92% said they were extremely satisfied with the friendliness and empathy of their consultant;
89% said they were extremely satisfied with how much their consultant involved them in decisions about their care.
Further insights from our out-patient survey show that Bupa patients who scored their consultants ten out of ten placed great importance on:
Their consultants being approachable and caring;
Feeling listened to;
Ease of booking of appointments;
Quick access to care.
Patients’ comments
This was evidenced through comments including:
‘My consultant was very helpful and reassuring and provided a clear path forward for treatment of my condition. He explained the procedure, the risks and the likely outcomes.’
‘Friendly, experienced, knowledgeable staff. Comfortable waiting room. My consultant is always very polite and gentle. He explains everything very clearly so I have confidence in him.’
‘My consultant is very approachable and answered all my questions.’
‘Very easy to book, quick to see a doctor, every person was helpful and friendly.’
Expressing dissatisfaction
Bupa patients also get in touch when things haven’t gone quite as they expected, although this is much rarer. The number of Bupa patients expressing dissatisfaction or making formal complaints about their care has remained low, at just over 1% for the last few years.
The three main reasons Bupa patients cited for their dissatisfaction or complaints were:
- Clinical care and treatment (34%);
- Appointment services (22%);
- The healthcare professional, hospital or clinic’s billing (22%).
When we took a closer look at this, the reasons why patients complained about clinical care and treatment related to the standard of clinical care, the length of time it took for them to receive their results and lack of confidence in their treatment or consultant.
Complaints about appointment services focused on the length of time to get an appointment and appointments being cancelled.
To avoid this happening, it’s important that patients are aware of any potential challenges with securing an appointment to help manage expectations. We also ask consultants to let us know if they are not taking new patients, so that we can let patients know.
The billing complaints focused on the healthcare professional, hospital or clinic’s invoicing process and what they believed were excessive charges.
Conclusion
While positive feedback is always great to hear, the learnings from when things don’t go so well are valuable in helping us to deliver for patients.
What our surveys show is that in both the positive and less positive circumstances, communication is a key theme in the patients’ feedback.
The reasons the patients gave are often rooted in how they are communicated with and not feeling sufficiently involved in decisions about their care. It’s encouraging that these patients’ expectations aren’t unrealistic, so this is something that we can easily remedy; they just want to be heard and involved.
Tricia Carley-White (right) is head of clinical quality and governance at Bupa UK Insurance
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