Every year, millions of patients across the State receive care in the NSW public health system – the largest in Australia. Maintaining high standards of care in such an enormous health system, which has often been described as one of the best in the world, is a mammoth task.

Hearing directly from patients about their healthcare experiences helps to highlight where things are going well and where improvements are needed.

The Bureau of Health Information (BHI) gives patients the opportunity to have a say about their healthcare experiences through our NSW Patient Survey Program. Over the past 14 years we have continually refined the program to ensure we are asking patients the right questions at the right time and delivering results as quickly as possible. Our recent innovations, in particular, have succeeded in delivering marked improvements to achieve these goals.

Timeliness of reporting

While BHI surveys are reflective by design, the sooner we can provide the results to health professionals responsible for making improvements, the sooner necessary changes can be implemented to benefit patients.

With this firmly in mind, BHI has been working hard to accelerate the collection, analysis and delivery of our survey results.

While maintaining the high quality of our reflective analysis, in 2023 we managed to significantly reduce the time between survey respondents' encounters with healthcare services and the publication of results for three of our key surveys – the Adult Admitted Patient, Virtual Care and Outpatient Cancer Clinics surveys.

We have also delivered anonymised comments from patients, captured through the free-text responses to our surveys, to the NSW Ministry of Health and local health districts on a quarterly basis within six months of the sampling period, rather than annually.

Minimum question sets

To ensure we are capturing information about aspects of care that matter most to particular cohorts of patients, BHI developed a ‘minimum question set’ in 2023 that can be applied across all NSW Patient Survey Program questionnaires. These question sets support streamlining and consistency across surveys, and enable us to focus on collecting information about aspects of care most important to patients.

Question modules

BHI has also introduced flexible question modules so we can provide health professionals with information about specific population groups and their journeys of care. These modules comprise questions applicable to particular cohorts of patients that can be added to the core questions in our surveys where required. For example, we have developed modules with questions tailored to seek feedback on patients’ experiences with ambulance services, virtual care, rural emergency care and elective surgery in NSW.

Looking ahead, BHI will continue to work on initiatives that further strengthen and streamline our NSW Patient Survey Program to best support the NSW Health system to deliver the best possible healthcare across the State.

More information on BHI patient surveys is available here.