The Center of Excellence for Pediatric Quality Measurement (CEPQM) team sought to improve administration and understanding of patient needs and their family’s/caregiver’s experience with their child’s inpatient stay. The Child Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (Child HCAHPS) was built on the core domains of the Adult HCAHPS instrument.
The Child HCAHPS Survey is a survey of parents or guardians about pediatric inpatient experience of care. The team developed Child HCAHPS as a measure that can be used nationally by payers (public and private), providers, and consumers for public reporting, quality management, and tracking purposes. The instrument has 18 single-item and composite measures categorized into five overarching groups:
- Communication with parent.
- Communication with child.
- Attention to safety and comfort.
- Hospital environment.
- Hospital rating.
The measures are case-mix adjusted. Child HCAHPS allows for the tracking of quality improvement within individual hospitals and for the comparison of quality across pediatric settings.
Measure Specifications
The Center of Excellence for Pediatric Quality Measurement (CEPQM) team developed a resource called What’s Available for the CAHPS Child Hospital Survey to introduce users to the questionnaire, survey instructions, data analysis programs, and reporting guidance that is available for Child HCAHPS. This resource is designed for users to review as they prepare for survey administration and includes descriptions of the instructional materials that comprise the package of Child HCAHPS survey materials. This resource can be downloaded as a PDF (330 KB).
Note: Materials needed to field the survey are included in this toolkit in the Other Resources section.
The Patient Experience Measures from the CAHPS Child Hospital Survey document reviews the types of measures that comprise the CAHPS Child Hospital Survey. The resource lists each composite, single-item, and rating measure generated by this survey. Additionally, the resource offers basic guidance for reporting the survey results to consumers and other audiences. This document can be downloaded as a PDF (316 KB).
Measure Reporting
The Center of Excellence for Pediatric Quality Measurement (CEPQM) team developed a how-to guide for administering the Child Hospital Survey. Fielding the CAHPS Child Hospital Survey Sampling Guidelines and Protocols includes sampling guidelines, recommended modes for data collection and protocol templates for mail, telephone and email data collection, and instruction on tracking returned questionnaires. This resource will help users understand how to calculate the response rate, and it offers guidance on determining whether a response is complete and increasing the number of responses. This resource can be downloaded as a PDF (484 KB).
Once surveys have been administered, the Preparing Data from CAHPS Surveys for Analysis provides step-by-step instructions for preparing raw survey data for analysis using the CAHPS Analysis Program for SAS (also known as the CAHPS macro) or another statistical package. This document also explains how to compute scores using a variety of approaches. This document can be downloaded as a PDF (346 KB).
Note: The CAHPS macro is included in this toolkit in the Other Resources section.
Improving Response Rates and Representation of Hard-to-Reach Groups in Family Experience Surveys, featured in Academic Pediatrics, discusses the research team’s experience using tablets to administer the Child HCAHPS survey to difficult-to-reach populations. This article can be accessed at https://www.academicpedsjnl.net/article/S1876-2859(18)30471-6/abstract.
