Patients’ rating of primary care provider’s explanations | Health Quality Alberta Focus

Healthcare Areas

Also in this section
primary icon

Primary Healthcare

Patients’ rating of primary care provider’s explanations

How patients rated their primary care provider explaining things in a way they could understand at their most recent visit. (See data definition).

*Data courtesy of Health Quality Alberta Primary Care Patient Experience Survey.

What do you think?

  • How do explanations from your primary care provider contribute to your overall care experience?
  • How does your experience with your primary care provider’s explanations compare to those reported by other Albertans?

Understanding “patients’ rating of primary care provider's explanations”

In surveys conducted between October 2018 to March 2023, Health Quality Alberta asked patients who recently visited their primary care provider:

  • How would you rate the way your care provider explained things in a way you could understand in your most recent visit?

Patients could choose “excellent / very good / good / fair / poor”.

Patient experience is likely better if the care provider explains things in a way that the patient can understand. Patient understanding leads to improvement in self-care, medication adherence and confidence in the support that is being provided.

Considerations when viewing the results

As primary care providers work to develop a better understanding of how they could improve this rating, other questions can be asked, such as:

  • Did the provider seek to understand the language literacy of their patient? Patients may have different levels of understanding based on their language and backgrounds.
  • What is our process for checking for understanding throughout and toward the end of the patient visit?
  • What processes are in place to clarify medical terminology or acronyms that are unfamiliar?
  • If family members are part of the visit, do they understand what has been discussed?
  • If educational materials are provided, are they developed with patient understanding in mind? Have they been tested by patients for clarity?

For information about Health Quality Alberta’s patient experience surveys offered to individual clinics in Alberta, please visit Health Quality Alberta’s website.