Elsevier

Health Policy

Volume 120, Issue 4, April 2016, Pages 377-383
Health Policy

Public reporting on quality, waiting times and patient experience in 11 high-income countries

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthpol.2016.02.008Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Highlights

  • Public reporting of waiting times and patient experience are common.

  • Composite measures of quality of hospital care are only used in one of 11 countries.

  • Reporting of outcomes of individual physicians is also uncommon.

Abstract

This article maps current approaches to public reporting on waiting times, patient experience and aggregate measures of quality and safety in 11 high-income countries (Australia, Canada, England, France, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States). Using a questionnaire-based survey of key national informants, we found that the data most commonly made available to the public are on waiting times for hospital treatment, being reported for major hospitals in seven countries. Information on patient experience at hospital level is also made available in many countries, but it is not generally available in respect of primary care services. Only one of the 11 countries (England) publishes composite measures of overall quality and safety of care that allow the ranking of providers of hospital care. Similarly, the publication of information on outcomes of individual physicians remains rare. We conclude that public reporting of aggregate measures of quality and safety, as well as of outcomes of individual physicians, remain relatively uncommon. This is likely to be due to both unresolved methodological and ethical problems and concerns that public reporting may lead to unintended consequences.

Keywords

Patient satisfaction
Quality of health care
Benchmarking

Cited by (0)

Open Access for this article is made possible by a collaboration between Health Policy and The European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies.