L. E. Peters1,2, J. Zhao1,2, H. Pearce1, G. Zhang2, S. Smith1,2,3, P. Pockney1,2,3 1John Hunter Hospital,Department Of Surgery,Newcastle, NSW, Australia 2University of Newcastle,Faculty Of Health,Newcastle, NSW, Australia 3Hunter Medical Research Institute,Newcaslte, NSW, Australia
Introduction:
Patient reported outcomes are becoming increasingly important in surgical quality in healthcare projects. There has been a continuing decline in health-related survey responses in the last 30 years, with most published data claiming between 20-60% response rates. A 75% response rate has been deemed necessary to ensure validity in a study; a very difficult target to reach. We have sought to design a methodology to increase the response rate of patient phone surveys using unblocked numbers and text messages for a quality in healthcare project.
Methods:
For our project, patients were contacted via unblocked mobile phones one week after discharge from hospital. They were not made aware that they would be contacted for the project. If contact was not made after two consecutive phone calls on the same day, a text message was sent to the patient explaining the rationale for the call. If still no response by the following day, patients were then called once again with the same number. We recorded our response rate including at which stage in the method it occurred. The survey itself was always conducted via a call and could not be completed through text message.
Results:
We attempted contact of 1112 patients. Though our method we achieved an 83.7% response rate. 74% of the patients responded to the first attempt at contact. A further 9.7% of patients were recaptured using text messaging and a call the following day. Of the 181 patients who did not participate the in study, 20 of them answered the call but did not wish to participate.
Conclusion:
With this method, we were able to achieve a superior response rate of 83.7%. At our institution, patients are routinely called the day after discharge with a blocked number which achieves a response rate of 20-50%. We believe our high response rate can be contributed to two main factors: firstly due to the unblocked number which allows patients to directly return a missed call and may increase the likelihood of answering, and secondly the text messages which notifies the patients of the reason for the call, serving as a less intrusive method of communication. We have demonstrated the effectiveness in our centre for achieving a response rate greater than 75%. Validation in other centres is required to ensure reproducibility.