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Patient-reported experiences with hospitals: comparison of proxy and patient scores using propensity-score matching.
Int J Qual Health Care. 2014 Feb;26(1):34-40
Authors: Bjertnaes O
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to compare patient-experience scores between patients with a proxy response and without a proxy response, using propensity-score matching to maximize the comparability between these two groups.
DESIGN: Cross-sectional survey.
SETTING: Hospital inpatient services in Norway.
PARTICIPANTS: Patients were randomly selected from each of the 61 hospitals in Norway during spring 2011. Postal questionnaires were mailed to 23 420 patients after their discharge from hospital.
INTERVENTION: No intervention.
MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: All of the patient respondents (n = 8744) and the matched cases (n = 734) were compared with patients with a proxy response (n = 734) on 12 patient-experience indicators using t-tests.
RESULTS: Compared with patient respondents, patients with a proxy response had poorer health, were older and were more often discharged from the hospital to another health-care institution (P < 0.001). Patients with a proxy response yielded significantly lower patient-experience scores than those without a proxy response for 9 of the 12 indicators. Compared with the matched patient group, patients with a proxy response had significantly lower scores for 3 of the 12 indicators and a significantly higher score for one indicator. Differences in scores between patients with a proxy response and the matched patient sample were small, with the largest difference being 4 on a scale of 0-100.
CONCLUSIONS: Patients with a proxy response report somewhat poorer experiences than those without a proxy response; however, proxies represent a different patient group than the patient group as a whole, and the results were very similar after controlling for these differences.
PMID: 24334233 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]