The hospital Krankenhaus der Augustinerinnen which is based in Cologne, Germany, sees on average over 13 thousand in-patients and over 28 thousand outpatients on a yearly basis. The hospital has 750 employees who take care of the well being of all patients at its 300-bed facility. Along with being a regional hospital, the Krankenhaus der Augustinerinnen is part of the University of Cologne. In order to increase transparency and quality, the Augustinerinnen hospital decided on a hospital evaluation.
Challenges in Healthcare Quality Management
Hospitals in Germany are obliged to carry out an annual hospital evaluation. Within the scope of this evaluation, for the first time, the Krankenhaus der Augustinerinnen wanted to know the levels of satisfaction for all of its staff and referring doctors. It was important that the surveys could be conducted through different channels. The survey of the referring physicians should be conducted by post using paper questionnaires. For employees, the evaluations should be available in digital form, both via a work PC and mobile devices. Another feature that the hospital wished for was the ability to save the questionnaire mid-way and for the employee to come back to it at a later time.
Effective Multi-Channel Solution: Paper & Digital
The clinic evaluation aimed at identifying strengths as well as potentials for improvement by employees and referring physicians and to implement these.
Spectos supported the hospital in all aspects of the survey preparation. The letters mailed out to referring doctors were produced in-house with the support of the Spectos letter shop. The gathering of data was handled by the Spectos service center which collected information directly from participants. The project management department of Spectos handled the programming of the online survey. The use of tokens ensured that each employee participated in the study once. Anonymity was also taken into account in the implementation and evaluation.
Better Quality Management for Krankenhaus der Augustinerinnen
As a result of the evaluation, concrete fields of action for optimizing the employee experience could be identified for the hospital as a whole, but also for individual departments and professional groups.
The results of the clinic evaluation and the associated focus on employee and patient orientation were included in the KTQ (Cooperation for Transparency in Quality) certification, a quality management system for cooperation on transparency and quality in health care.
