Long-form Surveys
With guidance from sector-specific committees, the OHA has led efforts to refresh and enhance the long-form patient experience surveying instruments available to hospitals, and to ensure the continued use of common, validated long-form surveys to meet evolving hospital and patient needs.
Traditional long-form patient experience surveys are designed to capture a wide set of experience measures. Survey results from common long-form surveys contain rich information that can be used to meet public reporting and accountability requirements, and inform inter- and intra-hospital comparison, benchmarking, and quality improvement over time. As part of the current patient surveying services contract, scientifically robust and validated long-form surveys have been made available for a number of hospital sub-sectors.
Guiding Principles for Long-From Survey Selection
Since 2014, the OHA led several survey review committees made up of hospital and system stakeholders including representatives from hospitals, physicians, patients, Health Quality Ontario, the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care, and Local Health Integration Networks, to select patient survey tools for recommended use in the OHA-managed patient surveying services contract. National and international thought leaders and subject-matter experts were also consulted throughout this process to ensure alignment among instruments and a methodological approach. There was a strong preference for non-proprietary survey instruments.
The survey review committees used the following guiding principles to make their final recommendations:
- Supports actionable improvement at the point of care
- Meaningful for patients (measures what is important and intended)
- Enables sector-wide comparisons and benchmarking
- Resists fragmentation, supports trending over time (provincially/regionally)
- Supports regulator's goals for sector accountability
- Enables alignment with national partners
- Enables efficient and cost-effective collection
Available Surveys
Below, you will find links to the long-form patient experience survey instruments recommended by the OHA-led survey review committees. Hospitals can view the complete list of the pre-programmed 20+ standardized patient experience surveying instruments the OHA has made available in the Qualtrics XM platform including proprietary and non-proprietary surveys. This guide has been updated to clarify what survey modes are available and instructions for obtaining permissions to use any of the five proprietary surveys.
Note: All surveys are available in English and French. Some surveys are available in languages other than English and French. Please contact us at patientexperience@oha.com for additional information.
