Chapter 2. Survey Administration Statistics

This chapter presents descriptive information on the 2008 database hospitals regarding how they conducted survey administration.

The 2008 database consists of survey data from 519 hospitals with a total of 160,176 hospital staff respondents. Participating hospitals administered the Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture to their hospital staff between October 2004 and July 2007, and voluntarily submitted their data for inclusion into the database.

 Because hospitals do not necessarily administer the hospital patient safety culture survey every single year, but may administer it on an 18-month, 24-month, or other administration cycle, the comparative database is a “rolling” benchmark. Data from prior years is retained in the database when a hospital does not have new data to submit; older data is replaced with more recent data when it is available; and new data is added from hospitals submitting for the first time. Overall statistics for the hospitals included in the 2008 database are shown in Table 2-1, broken down according to when the data were submitted. For the 2008 database overall, an average of 309 completed surveys were submitted per hospital (range: 11 to 3,865 surveys), with an average hospital response rate of 54 percent (range: 8 to 100 percent).

 Most hospitals administered only paper surveys (48 percent), followed by web (27 percent) and mixed mode administrations involving both paper and web surveys (25 percent) (See Table 2-2).

 As shown in Table 2-3, paper survey administrations received a considerably higher average response rate (60 percent) than web (44 percent) or mixed mode administrations (52 percent). It is therefore still an overall recommendation that hospitals conduct the Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture as a paper survey, but each hospital should take into consideration its own prior experience with survey modes and response rates when determining which mode is best.

 Most hospitals (362 or 70 percent) administered the survey to a census of all hospital staff, or a sample of staff, from all hospital work areas/units; fewer hospitals (100 or 20 percent) administered the survey to a subset of selected staff or work areas/units; and only 57 hospitals (11 percent) administered the survey to a subset of selected staff and selected work areas/units (see Table 2-4). Ten hospitals did not administer the entire survey; they excluded one or more of the non-demographic survey items. Those 10 hospitals were excluded from composite calculations if they omitted one or more of the items within a particular composite, but were included in item-level calculations for those items they retained.

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