Patient Experience Week is April 23 - 29! This special awareness week is an opportunity to celebrate accomplishments, re-energize efforts and honour the people who impact patient experience every day. This includes everyone from nurses and physicians, to support staff and administrative professionals, to patients, families and communities served across the province.
BC Renal staff, and our provincial network of kidney care professionals who work within the five regional health authorities and BC Childrens’ Hospital, are committed to improving experiences and outcomes of the 16,000+ registered kidney patients living in BC. In 2022, we conducted our most recent province-wide patient experience survey and the results are being shared throughout 2023 and beyond to help identify what is already working well and to guide improvements.
“Across the BC Renal network, kidney care professionals of all disciplines are taking steps in their daily practices to improve patient experiences and outcomes,“ says Dr. John Antonsen, one of BC Renal’s senior medical leads. “It’s encouraging to see from our survey results what’s continuing to work well and where progress has been made, and we are also grateful for patient feedback that will help our provincial committees and regional programs make improvements.”
In the spirit of Patient Experience Week, here are some of the results of what the provincial renal network is already doing well for many patients:
Overall quality of services by treatment modality
Compared to the last survey in 2016, and despite the many challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020, overall patient satisfaction across all treatment modalities continued in 2022 to be mostly in the good-to-excellent range. The only statistically significant change was a decrease in overall satisfaction for in-centre hemodialysis. For all treatment modalities, insights from patients as well as experiences of health professionals are helping to guide positive changes.
Opportunity for patient goal-setting
One way patient experiences and outcomes can be improved is through collaborative goal-setting between patients and their care teams, focusing on what matters to the patient. Part of the process is for care team members to ask and help patients set specific and achievable health goals. See the following BC Renal web pages for related information and tools:
Additional resources for patients, family members and other care partners
“Patients and those close to them who help with their care can also take an active role in improving their experiences and outcomes with the help of resources available in the
Managing My Care section of the BC Renal website,” says Helen Chiu, BC Renal quality lead, patient-centred performance improvement. “The Kidney Foundation’s
Kidney Wellness Hub also offers many resources in a user-friendly way to help patients manage their own care and live well with chronic kidney disease, plus the opportunity for people who share similar experiences to connect.”
Survey reports and infographics
See the
BC Renal Disease & System Statistics web page for the province-wide survey reports, including an overall report for BC and reports by treatment modality. There, you can also access two full-page infographics that provide more of an overview of the results. To protect privacy and confidentiality, all survey results are presented without names or any personal information.
