Quality assurance in Austrian hospitals a priority goal
The safeguarding and continual improvement of the quality of medical services offered thus is a natural wish for private health insurers. To achieve this, a number of concrete measures have been initiated:
Customers questionnaires
The questionnaire campaign implemented over the past two years by Austrian private health insurance companies about the satisfaction of their customers with the services rendered in the special hospital class currently shows 144,174 responses which can be evaluated by the hospitals. Based on a scientifically validated questionnaire, private health insurers have thus a valuable source of information on customer satisfaction which is unique in Austria. While the evaluation of the questionnaires cannot provide any direct evidence about the medical quality offered, it does give details regarding the subjective quality experienced by special class patients during their stay in hospital.
The results show that, for a large number of the hospitals, patient satisfaction is currently very high. For some hospitals, however, the findings are much less satisfactory. A summary of the general results can be found in the Annex.
"The high rate of satisfaction of customers insured in the special class with most of our hospitals confirms that we are heading in the right direction with the quality demands we make on hospitals. Where specific questions have arisen in the questionnaires about certain hospitals, we will conduct intensive talks with the hospitals concerned," says Dr. Peter Eichler, spokesman for the Austrian private insurance companies at VVO. The private health insurers will inform their contractual partners about the concrete results of the customer survey. "The success of the special class insurance depends to a great extent on the quality subjectively experienced by patients in hospital. It is the responsibility of individual insurers to inform their customers, as necessary, about the results of the survey."
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