Our aim is to provide you with the best experience and care. We do that in a variety of ways, including by:

• Consulting an independent group of consumer voice experts who champion the patient experience.
• Involving patients in our healthcare service design through a human-centred design approach.
• Using patient experience surveys to gather feedback from recently discharged patients.
• Measuring and comparing net promoter score performance at each of our hospitals.

A collaborative approach to healthcare service design

Human-centred design (also known as co-design) is a process by which service providers and consumers work together with expert designers to improve a service. Our National Consumer Council champions this process.

It is a collaborative approach used in multiple settings around the world. We are committed to increasingly adopting human-centred design at Southern Cross Healthcare because bringing patients into the design process results in services that respond more sensitively to patient and whānau needs. One example of this is our "blood clots and You" brochure which was developed using human-centred design.

If you would like to help us improve our services, we would love to hear from you. We are always looking for ways to improve the patient experience and there are different ways you can be involved.

Understanding the patient experience

Patient experience surveys

We invite our patients to complete a voluntary survey after their discharge. This is a chance for them to share their experience of our care, the hospital environment and our amenities, while these are still fresh in their mind.

If survey feedback indicates we need to review a service or facility, we can take action. Survey responses also enable us to measure the effectiveness of the continuous improvements we are making to our service design.

We report on patient experience feedback targets to our Board and use the national average across Cemplicity’s other New Zealand clients as a basis for comparison.

Net promoter score measurement

The net promoter score (NPS) metric measures the willingness of our patients to recommend us to their friends and families. It provides a gauge of our patients’ loyalty and engagement, based on their response to the question: “How likely would you be to recommend our hospital to your friends and family?’ from 1 (highly unlikely) to 10 (highly likely).

The NPS will range from -100 to +100 and is calculated as follows:

Our NPS performance

NPS scores are continuously monitored by our hospital and national teams. Performance is reviewed in the context of the wider feedback we receive from our patients and their whānau. We compare NPS scores between our own hospitals, and with other private surgical providers who also use the Cemplicity survey.

Compared with sixteen surgical providers in New Zealand and abroad who use the same survey, NPS’s ranging from 73 to 92 across the group, Southern Cross Healthcare consistently ranks in the top percentile with an average NPS of 90 across our hospital network.

Why NPS is important to us

Measuring our NPS score allows us to keep track of:

• How each Southern Cross hospital is performing
• How our entire network of wholly owned hospitals are performing
• How our performance compares to other private surgical providers

By continuously seeking feedback about our patients’ experiences, we can identify opportunities to improve our services and confirm what is working well.

Knowing that a high percentage of our patients would recommend our hospitals to their friends and family confirms to us that our patient-centric approach to service design is succeeding in its aims.