CSS has been surveying its insured persons since 2014 about their general satisfaction after an acute hospital stay. Insured persons aged 18 and over who have spent at least one night in hospital during the preceding three months are included in the survey. An insured person will be asked about their hospital or rehabilitation experience only once during any particular year.
When interpreting these results, please note that they are not risk-adjusted. Adjusting quality indicators to take account of risk means that patient-specific factors such as age, length of stay or prior illnesses, as well as differences in the distribution of these risks (patient mix) between hospitals are also factored into the calculation. Therefore, a lower level of patient satisfaction does not necessarily translate to a poorer quality of result.
The questionnaire contains 21 main questions, broken down into various categories (e.g. “Administrative procedures”, “Doctors”, etc.). A single category may contain several questions whose results are reported as mean values.
You can find details of the various questions and categories in the patient satisfaction questionnaire (in German).
As incomplete questionnaires (e.g. only four of the seven questions in the "Doctors" category answered) are included in the analysis, the number of responses indicated may vary. The scale of 1–6 (the same system used in Swiss schools) has 1 as the poorest rating ("not at all") and 6 as the best rating ("fully").
On the whole, we regularly achieve good response rates to our surveys. However, please note that not all hospitals receive a large number of ratings. This is because they do not all treat the same number of patients insured with CSS who are subsequently surveyed.
Note: persons insured with CSS who have stayed at an inpatient rehabilitation facility have also been surveyed since 2016. These results are not yet published in QualiCheck.