Soliciting patient complaints to improve performance.

Background: A study was conducted in 2000 to describe service quality problems in a large tertiary care teaching hospital and evaluate the effect of a pre-discharge program for active complaint surveillance and resolution on patient satisfaction.

Methods: The pre-post intervention study with temporal controls was conducted at a tertiary care teaching hospital in St Louis. Eighty-four percent (1,023 of 1,218) of patients admitted to a general medical unit between October 2, 2000, and December 22, 2000, were interviewed by a patient advocate to identify and address patient complaints about service quality.

Development of a healthcare quality improvement measurement tool: results of a content validity study.

Current methods of measuring continuous quality improvement (CQI) implementation are too long and not comprehensive. A new survey for CQI implementation was developed and tested for content validity using a panel of 8 experts--7 from the United States and 1 from England. The survey was reduced from 70 items to 22.