Lack of Association Between Press Ganey Emergency Department Patient Satisfaction Scores and Emergency Department Administration of Analgesic Medications

Does the Press Ganey Survey Correlate to Online Health Grades for a Major Academic Otolaryngology Department?

“…The current literature is mixed and shows no concrete data linking the PGPSS to objective patient health outcomes. [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17] Emily Boss's work from Johns Hopkins University examined the demographics of who was more likely to respond to the PGPSS. Boss found that parents of children who were white and privately insured were 1.77 (P = .013) and 2.90 (P .001) times more likely to respond to the survey, respectively.…”

Global Emergency Medicine Journal Club: A Social Media Discussion About the Lack of Association Between Press Ganey Scores and Emergency Department Analgesia

“…Patient satisfaction was mentioned as a possible driving force for unnecessary opioid prescriptions at discharge. The Global Emergency Medicine Journal Club consensus was that the findings of Schwartz et al, 3 which showed no association between patient satisfaction and ED analgesia, should not be extrapolated to analgesic prescriptions dispensed on discharge. Study author Babu noted that the Press Ganey scores evaluate only the experience in the ED and are not intended to reflect postdischarge care.…”

“…In this installment of the Global Emergency Medicine Journal Club, we discussed an article by Schwartz et al 3 on the association of Press Ganey scores with analgesia administered in the emergency department (ED). In this retrospective review, the authors linked ED visit information from 2 hospitals in Rhode Island, totaling 4,749 Press Ganey patient satisfaction survey scores for patients discharged between October 2009 and September 2011.…”

Ethical Pain Management in the Emergency Department: The Canary in the Coal Mine

“…Together, these mandates may force emergency department providers to consider the outpatient prescription of narcotic pain medications against their medical judgment as a 'path of least resistance'. The available evidence suggests that few emergency physicians are judged adversely in patient satisfaction surveys based on the issue of providing narcotic medication prescriptions at discharge [25]. But the very possibility heightens the ethical tension for emergency department providers between exercising professional judgment on the need for outpatient narcotic analgesia and the real biases and presuppositions that are evident in the track record of pain management in this setting.…”