Why should you care?

At Children's Mercy Hospitals and Clinics, we believe being extraordinary includes taking responsibility for the quality of service we provide. Asking patients and families about our service is an essential part of measuring our performance and outcomes. We love positive feedback but also welcome suggestions for improvement.

For example, we ask specific questions about the Patient/Family Experience at our hospital and gather responses on the critical question of whether those we serve would recommend Children's Mercy to others.

One critical target this year is to have at least 86 percent of respondents answer "Yes, definitely" to the survey question "Would you recommend this hospital to your family and friends?" Achieving this 86 percent positive response rate would put Children's Mercy in the top 25 percent of children's hospitals nationwide and provide an initial step toward the hospital's ultimate goal of being one of the best in the world by achieving a rating in the 90th percentile.

Who is impacted?

Patients - Determining our strengths and opportunities for improvement as perceived by our patients and parents ensures continuing service excellence and efficiency, ultimately the health of the patients we serve.

Parents - Giving parents the opportunity to provide direct input about how we are performing conveys the message that we value their opinions and are truly committed to our mission. Parents appreciate and support an organization that cares enough to ask how we are doing. Families are viewed as an important part of our health care team and have important information about their child and their experience here that can help improve the quality of our treatment. While doctors are the experts on the disease, families are the experts on their child and measuring their perspective is an essential component in analyzing our performance and advancing our programs, facilities and systems.

Staff - Outcome measures teach us, on a large scale, how the treatment we provide helps the patients we care for. This information helps us learn how we can continue to improve our patient family centered focus. We also measure how well we perform certain tasks.

Our hospital - Measuring performance allows Children's Mercy to gauge how well we are serving the patients and families who entrust us with their care. When possible, we evaluate how care and services compare to national standards and benchmarks by looking at our care compared to other leading children's hospitals.

What does all this mean?

Measurement allows us to evaluate our performance, learn from experience, celebrate our successes, improve upon the care we provide and build confidence in our hospital among the patients and families we serve.

At Children's Mercy, we want to know if patients and families, based on their experience, would recommend our service to others. The percentage score is the percentage of patients and families that identified they would "Yes, definitely" recommend Children's Mercy to family and friends.

What do the most important people say?

Here is a sample of parent comment acknowledging the effort we make to measure our performance by asking for input:

The doctors and nurses were amazing, and very supportive of our needs and wishes for our son, and let us be a partners in his treatment and care. Our input was always welcome and taken into consideration. Thank you all so much!

The Children's Mercy team nurtures the children and families who are going through the most extraordinary life experiences…they offer more than medical attention-they offer hope.

We cannot begin to express in words our experience at Children's Mercy Hospital. The emotions we felt cannot be accurately described. In the simplest terms, we would say: We came in fear; we stayed and were comforted; we left grateful.