Your Visit

Patient and Family Experience Survey

At Seattle Children’s, we strive to offer the highest-quality medical care. Delivering a positive patient and family experience is important in meeting that goal: we want our patients and families to feel safe, seen and heard when entrusting us with their health. Beyond being a way for us to take responsibility for the care we provide, a positive patient experience can also improve health outcomes — and that is something we want to promote in every way we can.

To ensure we are providing the best possible experience, we ask for feedback from all our patients and families. We use the information we receive to do more of what we do well and improve in areas where we can do better. Our experience survey is one of the main ways we collect feedback from our patients and families.

Patients and families who visit Seattle Children’s are invited to participate in a survey about their visit. We use the scores and comments from the survey to improve our care and service experience. We also use them to compare ourselves to other leading children's hospitals across the country.

Because of the importance we place on patient and family experience, we work with an external vendor, Press Ganey, a global company offering services to improve patient experience in health care around the world. Press Ganey is considered the gold standard, industry-leading expert for patient experience surveying and developing actionable solutions to improve problem areas and transform the care experience.

Patient and family voice matters to us, and we hear and honor it throughout the hospital. We listen so we can improve. Examples of how we have used results from our patient and family experience survey include:

  • Making changes to the Emergency Department triage process to ask patient families about their preferred care language
  • Adding a button to the medical record to track frequency of care updates to patient families
  • Developing strategies to improve teams working together on patient care

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the purpose of the experience survey?

We want to hear directly from patients and families about what we did well and where we can do better, so we can make the care experience the best it can be. We also use our experience survey scores to compare ourselves to other leading hospitals across the country. We do this so we can make sure we’re living up to highest standards of care, and so we can be proactive about improving our services to patients and families.

What does Seattle Children’s do with the feedback from the experience survey?

We carefully review the survey scores and comments we get from patients and families, and share the feedback with the teams working in our hospital. We monitor the survey feedback closely and regularly so we can use the information patients and families share with us to continue improving — both as an organization as a whole, and across individual teams.

What does the experience survey measure?

The survey asks about different parts of the health care experience at Seattle Children’s. The specific questions included on the survey will be different depending on which type of care a patient received.

How do patients and families receive the survey?

A few days after a visit, the family receives a text message and/or email from Press Ganey with a link to complete the survey. It takes about 10 minutes to complete.

Why do you work with Press Ganey?

We work with Press Ganey so we can compare our performance scores against other health care organizations in the country, and so we can learn from best practices other health care organizations are using. Because Press Ganey is an independent global healthcare research company that specializes in patient experience surveys, using their survey questions and results methodology allows us to measure our performance in a way that is unbiased. The Press Ganey patient experience score was developed in 1985 and uses data technology, validated survey methods and rigorous testing methods to ensure that the most accurate patient experience is being reflected. More information about Press Ganey is available on their website.

Will patients and families be asked to take more than one survey if they saw more than one area of care?

If a patient’s visit involved several different areas of care within our hospital, the survey will only be about one of those areas — patients and families will not be asked to fill out multiple surveys about the same visit. Also, if a patient requires visits to the same area multiple times within a 90-day period, they will only be asked to fill out one survey about their experience with that area of care.

What other ways are there for patients and families to give feedback and/or get involved?

There are a number of ways for patients and families to give feedback and get involved with Seattle Children’s: