The value of experts by experience in social domain supervision in the Netherlands: results from a 'mystery guests' project.

Background: User involvement and participation in the supervision of the quality of care is an important topic for many healthcare inspectorates. It offers regulators an additional view on quality, increases the legitimacy and accountability of the inspectorate, empowers users and enhancing the public's trust in the inspectorate. To assess the accessibility of the local governmental social domain services the Joint Inspectorate Social Domain in the Netherlands worked together with people with intellectual disabilities performing as 'mystery guests' in an innovative project.

Centralisation of acute obstetric care in the Netherlands: a qualitative study to explore the experiences of stakeholders with adaptations in organisation of care.

Background: In the past decade, acute obstetric care (AOC) has become centralised in many high-income countries. In this qualitative study, we explored how stakeholders in maternity care perceived and experienced adaptations in the organisation of maternity care in areas in the Netherlands where AOC was centralised.

Methods: A heterogenic group of fifteen maternity care stakeholders, including patients, were purposively selected for semi-structured interviews.

Investigating the Potential Contribution of Patient Rating Sites to Hospital Supervision: Exploratory Results From an Interview Study in the Netherlands.

Background: Over the last decades, the patient perspective on health care quality has been unconditionally integrated into quality management. For several years now, patient rating sites have been rapidly gaining attention. These offer a new approach toward hearing the patient's perspective on the quality of health care.

Influence of Intensified Supervision by Health Care Inspectorates on Online Patient Ratings of Hospitals: A Multilevel Study of More Than 43,000 Online Ratings.

Background: In the Netherlands, hospitals with quality or safety issues are put under intensified supervision by the Dutch Health Care Inspectorate, which involves frequent announced and unannounced site visits and other measures. Patient rating sites are an upcoming phenomenon in health care. Patient reviews might be influenced by perceived quality including the media coverage of health care providers when the health care inspectorate imposes intensified supervision, but no data are available to show how these are related.

Trends in patient satisfaction in Dutch university medical centers: room for improvement for all.

Background: Results of patient satisfaction research provide hospitals areas for quality improvement. Although it may take several years to achieve such improvement, not all hospitals analyze changes in patient satisfaction over time structurally. Consequently, they lack information from patients' perspective on effectiveness of improvement programs.

Is the length of stay in hospital correlated with patient satisfaction?

Objective: To investigate the correlation between length of stay (LOS) and patient satisfaction on the level of hospital wards. The underlying hypothesis is that good quality of care leads both to shorter LOS and to patients that are more satisfied.

Design: We used standardized LOS and standardized patient satisfaction data from seven specialisms: internal medicine, cardiology, pulmonology, neurology, general surgery, orthopaedic surgery and obstetrics and gynaecology in the period 2003-2010.

Patient satisfaction revisited: a multilevel approach.

Patient satisfaction surveys are increasingly used for benchmarking purposes. In the Netherlands, the results of these surveys are reported at the univariate level without taking case mix factors into account. The first objective of the present study was to determine whether differences in patient satisfaction are attributed to the hospital, department or patient characteristics.