Patients to have say in amounts of hospital funding

Patient surveys at hospitals will be used to evaluate how much funding each one will receive from the national health scheme (Gesy) at the end of the year, the health insurance organisation (HIO) decided on Wednesday.

The HIO has said that patients will answer satisfaction surveys during their hospital visits, which will be sent to them via email after they are discharged.

Currently the survey questions are being examined by the patients association and the hospitals, to finalise the content.

Patient details will be known only to the HIO, and in no case will the answers and the evaluation made by the patient be shared with the hospitals or the doctors that treated the individual.

Hospitals will be informed at the end of each year of the overall score given to them by the patients they treated and will or will not receive the corresponding increase in funding.

In fact, patient satisfaction will be able to contribute up to 10 per cent of the increase that the hospitals will be able to secure in their compensation from Gesy based on the quality criteria.

In the questionnaire, eight different questions are included, which are related to the infrastructure in the rooms/wards, the behaviour of doctors and other health professionals and the guidance that the patients received from their doctors after they were discharged from the hospital.

The introductory email that the people will receive from the HIO will explain how to complete the questionnaire, but also the importance of their participation in the effort to record the quality of services that the beneficiaries receive through Gesy.

As the senior officer of HIO, Monica Kyriacou, explained to Philenews, “Among other things, the goal of the HIO is to give patients a say, to give our patients a voice and to be able to contribute to the evaluation through their answers to the questionnaire of the services offered by the Gesy hospitals.”