Telephone and web-based pediatric day surgery questionnaires.
OBJECTIVE
Patient questionnaires are popular tools for assessing and improving service quality, especially as administrators are increasingly expected to consider the patient's voice in their decision making. Despite web-based questionnaire advantages, they have not been previously compared to telephone questionnaires for assessing quality. The purpose of this paper is to compare telephone questionnaire administration with a web-based version.


METHODS
Day surgery patients from a tertiary pediatric hospital completed a telephone interview and a web-based questionnaire with identical questions. The appropriateness of the web version as a telephone version substitute was ascertained by comparing the number of changes in responses, non-responses, differences in means, the number of non-substantive responses and reliability.


RESULTS
The web-based questionnaire tended towards more negative responses. The mean number of missing responses did not differ between versions, although the web-questionnaire had more "not sure" responses. Inter-rater reliability was acceptable.


CONCLUSIONS
Parents without internet access were unable to participate.


CONCLUSIONS
The web-based questionnaire is a good substitute for telephone-administered questionnaires.


CONCLUSIONS
The paper shows that parents were able to rate items more candidly owing to the increase in privacy and lack of interviewer bias, which is crucial for improving health service quality.
Amari
Erica
E
British Columbia's Children's Hospital, Vancouver, Canada. eamari@sfu.ca
Vandebeek
Christine
C
Montgomery
Carolyne J
CJ
Skarsgard
Erik
E
Ansermino
J Mark
JM
D000556:Ambulatory Surgical Procedures; D003258:Consumer Behavior; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D010372:Pediatrics; D011785:Quality Assurance, Health Care / Q000458:organization & administration*; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D013689:Telephone; D013997:Time Factors