Patient complaint taxonomies support the using of healthcare complaints as a powerful tool to improve the quality and safety of patient care. Hospitals use complaint data at the organisational level to address quality variation across service lines and departments.
We applied a validated typology to identify where the complaints occur and gained deeper insights about how they can be more effectively utilised to drive and implement continuous quality improvement activities within a tertiary hospital. We included all complaints and opinions from patients and their families over a 5-year period at a large tertiary teaching hospital in Japan. Two analysts categorised the opinions into complaints and gratitude expressions, with complaints classified using Reader et al.’s taxonomy. We performed simple tabulations and determined the number of complaints across hospital sectors using the χ-square test, residual analysis and Cramer’s V tests to check for significant correlations between the variables.
A total of 6,607 complaints and comments were received. Of these, 5,401 related to the Clinical, Administrative, and Human Relations domains, respectively (11.1%, 56.1%, and 32.8%). At the domain level, the most common complaints related to the Relationships domain in both the Medical and Nursing departments. However, a detailed analysis of the category levels demonstrated that the Medical department received the most complaints in the Communication and Patient Rights category. Whereas in the Nursing department, the Humanness/caring and Patient rights categories were the most common categories for which complaints were received.The Administrative department complaints were mostly related to the Management domain, with the largest number of complaints related to the Institutional issue category.
We used a validated taxonomy to identify trends in patient complaints and identified the key departments that required remedial improvement actions. All hospital departments received direct and targeted feedback on how to effectively improve their clinical services.