Is there gender preference in patient satisfaction surveys?

[TWR]

After 26 years in family medicine as a pa, i have been working for a fp four 4 months that had previously had a female np for 4 1/2 years. In the 1st 3 months, my sp has spoken 2 me 2 times regarding some patients that were not satisfied. With my service to them. I am thinking do i practice differently than she did? I don't give out a lot of abx and i am conservative with pain meds. This practice has almost zero tolerance for unhappy patients. I mainly wondered whether patients have a more comfortable feeling with a female practitioner? Thanks for any thoughts. Tom

[chatcat]

Just wondering if your SP was able to provide you with specifics about the patients who had problems with your services?

In order to improve service you need to be able to focus on areas that need improvement otherwise entertaining patient complaints is basically in vain.

 

In the clinics I work in we do patient satisfaction surveys twice a year for a month. Any negative responses to clinical services is provided with a comment area for further explanation and the opportunity to be contacted. On any given survey we have 98% satisfaction rate....but that 2% who

respond with negative comments always proves interesting. Review of the complaints typically has nothing to do with the medical services provided,rather, is due to patient's interactions with clinical staff. The negative interaction can be something as understandable as just dealing with a difficult personality or it can be due to staff not being perceived as being attentive enough to patients. In 4 years of doing follow-up on patient satisfaction surveys I have never discovered a problem with the actual quality of medical services provided.

 

To answer your question about gender bias in surveys, there really shouldn't be any bias when it comes to good patient encounters. You could be experiencing separation issues of patients from the previous female NP. Again, you really need very clear examples of what the patients have found lacking in order to focus on improvement.

(BTW: I do know that despite the very best of intentions and skills, there will always be people who complain)