I receive these great surveys after every doctor’s appointment any of us have with Medical here on Post. It is a survey from TRICARE asking us to please rate our visit with Dr. X on such and such date.
I received one for every visit I have with my regular doctor. We’ll call her Dr. Awesome. Except, the survey doesn’t ask me to rate Dr. Awesome, the survey asked me to rate my recent visit with, well we’ll call him Major Scriptwriter, because that is the function that he serves in my care. He is the supervising officer over my doctor, who approves all of my controlled medications. Every time one of them has to be refilled he has to sign off on the forms for them. I don’t actually see him unless there is a problem. In all fairness, he is pretty nice. But he doesn’t actually conduct my appointments. If I were to see him at an appointment, I would be more than happy to take a few minutes and fill out the surveys and return them.
I received several for The Kid’s immunizations asking me to review our appointments with Major Happygunns at Medical on several appointments. I matched the dates up in my datebook, not recognizing the name, and came to the conclusion that this must be the officer who supervises Immunizations. I do not know who this person is. Never seen hir. If the survey asked me to rate our visit w/ Sargent Needlejab, who has administered all of the vaccines and boosters and PPDs that we have needed since arriving in Country, and doing so while keeping The Kid from dealing everyone in the room a behind hook kick in the process (who decided to enroll her in Tae Kwon Do?), then great. He is actually a wonderful Army Medic, and is great with kids to boot, which isn’t easy to come by. He once let us sneak in to get a flu shot on a day that I had a particular foggy mix up and confused my appointment times.
But that is not what is going on here. I am being asked to rate supervisors based on what their subordinates are doing, and I am not OK with that. If I don’t return them I get little happy grams a few weeks or so later (because, funnily enough, they have to go all the way back to the states before arriving in my APO box, it seems) politely reminding me to please fill out my surveys.
The Guy thinks I should fill it out with really crappy marks, 0s across the board, and leave in the comments that the doctors couldn’t even be arsed to show up.
I am beginning to consider his suggestion.
Ha, LOL. Reminds me of the survey I was sent by my health insurance company in 2008. I had been “selected” as a mental health consumer to answer their questions about the quality of care. Well, let me say I was pretty much warehoused at that place, got absolutely no treatment and was threatened into compliance at the time (that later changed to just ignoring my problems). The survey disclaimer said that you’d need to discuss complaints with your treatment provider first, and I wasn’t going to raise any concern with Dr. Because-I-Said-So, who believed my condition (which she knew just enough about to throw its diagnostic criteria at me as an explanation for why I was upset everytime I was) called for all this. The survey went straight into the trash can. Another time, I was surveyed about my “last six months” on a psych ward, while I’d just moved wards a few weeks before and the new one is better.
Those forms are probably a consequence of accreditation, and reflective of the fact that health care has become a business.
Yes, your doctor is a small business owner, and expects to be billed that way.
I’ve been sent a few copies of a questionaire about a hospital stay and surgery I had over six months ago but as they don’t send it in an accessible format then I don’t see why I should do them the courtesy of returning it. Besides I’m pretty sure the hospital management are aware of my thoughts on my stay in hospital since I was visited by the chief executive as a result of several complaints I lodged at the time about the post-operative care I received, the poor standard of nursing care and the hospital infection I contracted due to a poor standard of cleaning, and all this in private health care, I’d have been much better off on the NHS! I’m still recovering from the infection I contracted and so the last thing I want to do is fill in a friendly little survey so that they can ‘help maintain our high standards of patient care’!
Yeah…surveys. Blergh.
Adelaide, I would be more inclined to agree if they weren’t TRICARE doctors. I don’t think they qualify as “small business” since they insure one of the world’s largest organization. My doctors get paid the same way my husband does.
One solution I have, however, is that I do make efforts to go to the Community Forums we have on Post, to voice my concerns that while I am glad they are interested in what we have to say about our care, I wish they would allow us to critique the actual providers of that care. I did read recently in Stars and Stripes online that there is going to be a focus group set up to field feedback on military provider visits. Sounds like my cuppa.
I can’t usually even fill in those surveys. The questions confuse me too much so they usually end up looking rather empty with 2/3 of the answers saying “I don’t get the question” or “Be more specific” or whatever.