Complaints guided quality improvement at hospital

Short Summary

Complaints and compensation claims inform about health care quality from the user's (patient) perspective. Hence, they can be viewed as an indicator of dissatisfaction and shortcomings in health care provision and can inform initiatives to improve health care quality and patient safety. Analysing compensation claims and complaints systematically for health care improvement, is a constructive use of this information.

Rationale

A novel approach to assessing treatment quality from both a patient's and a professional viewpoint is to look at patient complaints about substandard care and claims for injury compensation. Apart from causing an escalating cost to health service spending (to more than 1 billion annually in Denmark), complaints and compensation claims provide a unique source of data on health care quality. Complaints and compensation claims inform about health care quality from the user's (patient) perspective and, in parallel, case decisions inform about health care quality from the expert's point of view. Hence, patient complaints can be viewed as an indicator of patient dissatisfaction and shortcomings in health care provision that warrant attention and - if systematically analysed - can inform initiatives to improve health care quality and patient safety. At the same time, it is well acknowledged that compensation claims and complaints very often are highly motivated by patients' wish for improved health care quality and safety for future patients. Analysing compensation claims and complaints for health care improvement, therefore, can be viewed as fulfilling the perhaps most constructive purpose of these otherwise often highly debated systems. The financial costs of complaints and compensation cases amounts to over DKR billion annually at the national level (and more than 40 million annually at OUH) and, in addition to showing responsiveness to first-hand patient-centred insights, improving the quality of treatment and preventing new patient injuries, incentives are many to involve the cases as an essential source of information in the systematic work to improve the quality of treatment. Aim The purpose of this research project is to use a standardized taxonomy to identify types of information in complaints and compensation cases to enrich and qualify the ongoing quality improvement work at OUH (for example, the South Danish Improvement Model (SDIM).

Description of the cohort

All cases relating to the Odense University Hospital during the period 2017-2019 (inclusive) will be included and systematically reviewed and coded in accordance with the HCAT.

Data and biological material

Disciplinary complaints as well as compensation claims are assessed in the study. All cases relating to the Odense University Hospital during the period 2017-2019 (inclusive) will be included and systematically reviewed and coded in accordance with the HCAT. Cases are one by one reviewed by a rater trained in using the HCAT.

Collaborating researchers and departments