At Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre (TBRHSC), the Patient and Family Centred Care (PFCC) philosophy guides everything that we do, with the goal of delivering exceptional care for every patient every time.
The PFCC department is continuously evaluating strategies to support the delivery of quality patient and family centred care at TBRHSC. These strategies include the use of standardized patient experience surveys (PES) to monitor and evaluate the patient experience. The PES was developed by the Ontario Hospital Association and is utilized to drive quality improvement initiatives for leaders and decision makers at TBRHSC, as well as compare the organization’s performance relative to peer hospitals in Ontario. To garner its effectiveness, the use of PES data at TBRHSC is highly dependent on how accessible and comprehensible the resulting reports are for leaders and decision makers.
Using a survey of coordinators, managers and directors at TBRHSC, PFCC was able to gather feedback on the usefulness of the current patient experience reporting process to understand how this data is used in practice. 24 leaders and decision makers were surveyed to report on the effectiveness of dashboards showing real-time data of performance indicators, bi-weekly reports on text comments from discharged patients, and quarterly score cards showing results from PES questions.
On February 6, 2026, PFCC’s Hafsa Siddiqui (Data Specialist) and Joanita Nakimuli (Discharge Transition Lead, Patient Advocate) had the pleasure of presenting the outcome of this project at the St. Joseph’s Care Group Centre for Applied Health Research Showcase. The survey of participating leaders showed that dashboards and patient feedback reports are timely, easy to interpret and easy to explain to others. Of note, participants identified competing organizational priorities as a potential barrier to this strategy.
Overall, a survey of hospital leaders and decision makers indicated that patient experience data is useful for setting quality improvement priorities and monitoring progress over time, aiding in the focused undertaking of key performance indicators.
