It is exactly 8 years ago since the Sector Accountability & Funding Directorate, then known as Crown Company Monitoring & Advisory Unit or CCMAU), published the “Patient Satisfaction Survey Guidelines 2000”.¹ This report, which embodied the collaborative effort of several Ministry of Health staff and a team of public hospital Quality Managers and Customer Services personnel, described the newly proposed Inpatient and Outpatient questionnaires and explained in great detail the “Best Practice” methodology that should be used by all New Zealand public hospitals so that they would be able to monitor patient satisfaction accurately and reliably.

In an accompanying letter, the then Hon Minister of Health, Ms Annette King, said that (these guidelines) would…

• Improve the statistical robustness of survey results and the consistency with which district health boards (DHBs) can apply them.
• Expand the base of the patient populations being surveyed.
• Focus the questions asked on the key determinants of patient satisfaction, from the patients’ perspective.

The question that needs to be asked now is, has the implementation of the new survey gone to plan? Has the statistical robustness of the statistics and usefulness of the results been demonstrated? More to the point, and keeping in mind the issues raised in previous publications (Zwier & Clarke^2,3), are DHBs now in a position to use the data to better understand and/or increase patient satisfaction?