Patients don’t understand question often used to measure satisfaction in NHS

The “net promoter score,” which is widely used across the NHS in England to gauge patients’ satisfaction with health services and asks, “How likely is it that you would recommend this service,” is poorly understood and yields inaccurate answers, researchers have found.

The best way to gauge patients’ satisfaction with health services is to ask them to score their overall experience of care from 0 (“I had a very poor experience”) to 10 (“I had a very good experience”), says a report from the Picker Institute Europe and the Care Quality Commission.1

The research, done on behalf of the Department of Health, tested six potential questions with 85 people who had recently used the NHS to identify the best single “overarching” question to …