The Child Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (Child HCAHPS) Survey is a standardized survey instrument that asks parents and guardians (henceforth referred to as parents) of children under 18 years old to report on their and their child’s experiences with inpatient hospital care.
The performance measures of the Child HCAHPS survey consist of 39 items organized by overarching groups into the following 18 composite and single-item measures:
Communication with Parent
1. Communication between you and your child’s nurses (3 items)
2. Communication between you and your child’s doctors (3 items)
3. Communication about your child’s medicines (4 items)
4. Keeping you informed about your child’s care (2 items)
5. Privacy when talking with doctors, nurses, and other providers (1 item)
6. Preparing you and your child to leave the hospital (5 items)
7. Keeping you informed about your child’s care in the Emergency Room (1 item)
Communication with Child
8. How well nurses communicate with your child (3 items)
9. How well doctors communicate with your child (3 items)
10.Involving teens in their care (3 items)
Attention to Safety and Comfort
11.Preventing mistakes and helping you report concerns (2 items)
12.Responsiveness to the call button (1 item)
13.Helping your child feel comfortable (3 items)
14.Paying attention to your child’s pain (1 item)
Hospital Environment
15.Cleanliness of hospital room (1 item)
16.Quietness of hospital room (1 item)
Global Rating
17.Overall rating (1 item)
18.Recommend hospital (1 item)
We recommend that the scores for the Child HCAHPS composite and single-item measures be calculated using a top-box scoring method. The top box score refers to the percentage of respondents who answered survey items using the best possible response option. The measure time frame is 12 months. A more detailed description of the Child HCAHPS measure can be found in the Detailed Measure Specifications (Appendix A).
Measure Specs
General Information
Numerator
Using the top-box scoring method, the numerator of the top-box score for a measure consists of the number of respondents with a completed survey who gave the best possible answer for the item(s) in a measure.
For example, the top-box numerator for the communication between you and your child’s nurses composite is the number of respondents who answered “Always” to questions about how well nurses communicated well with them.
Denominator
The denominator for each single-item measure is the number of respondents with a completed survey who responded to the item. The denominator for each composite measure is the number of respondents with a completed survey who responded to at least one of the items within the measure. The target population for the survey is parents of children under 18 years old who have been discharged from the hospital during the target 12-month time frame.
Exclusions
SURVEY AND MEASURES 1-18
Exclude parents of certain patients from the measure (numerator and denominator) based on clinical and non-clinical criteria:
1. “No-publicity” patients
2. Court/law enforcement patients
3. Patients with a foreign home addresses
4. Patients discharged to hospice care (hospice-home or hospice-medical facility)
5. Patients who are excluded because of state regulations
6. Patients who are wards of the state
7. Healthy newborns
8. Maternity-stay patients
9. Patients admitted for observation
10. Patients discharged to skilled nursing facilities
11. Patients who are emancipated minors
MEASURES 1-18
Exclude respondents from the numerator and denominator of a measure if they have completed survey items in the measure using multiple marks (i.e., they gave multiple answers to an individual question).
MEASURES 8-9
Exclude the following respondents from the numerator and denominator:
1. All those who answered “No” to screener question 6 (Is your child able to talk with nurses and doctors about his or her health care?)
2. All those whose child was under 3 years old at discharge as determined using administrative data
MEASURE 10
Exclude the following respondents from the numerator and denominator:
1. All those who answered “No” in screener question 43 (During this hospital stay, was your child 13 years old or older?)
2. All those whose child was under 13 years old at discharge as determined using administrative data
3. All those who answered “No” in screener question 6 (Is your child able to talk with nurses and doctors about his or her health care?)
MEASURE 12
Exclude the following respondents from the numerator and denominator:
1. All those who answered “No” in screener question 25 (During this hospital stay, did you or your child ever press the call button?)
MEASURE 14
Exclude the following respondents from the numerator and denominator:
1. All those who answered “No” in screener question 30 (During this hospital stay, did your child have pain that needed medicine or other treatment?)
Measure Record
Point of Contact
NA
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