The Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS®) Hospital Survey (better known as HCAHPS) asks people about their recent experiences with inpatient care. There are two versions of this survey: one for adults and one for children. Both surveys are intended to facilitate objective and meaningful comparisons across hospitals of patients’ perspectives on aspects of care that are important to them.
The Child Hospital Survey (or Child HCAHPS) asks parents or caregivers to report on both their child’s experience as an inpatient and their own experience with their child’s inpatient hospital stay. The survey asks questions that are designed to understand the needs and experiences of pediatric patients (persons 17 years of age and younger) in a hospital setting. Using core domains of the Adult HCAHPS survey, Child HCAHPS focuses on aspects of pediatric inpatient care that are important to patients and their parents, and for which patients and their parents are generally the best source of information. The survey asks parents and guardians about communication with clinicians such as doctors and nurses, the hospital environment, pain management, and other aspects of care that are part of an inpatient experience.
The Child Hospital Survey was developed by the Center of Excellence for Pediatric Quality Measurement (CEPQM) at Boston Children's Hospital in collaboration with the CAHPS Consortium. The Child Hospital Survey has National Quality Forum (NQF) endorsement.
This toolkit is designed for hospital and health system users to guide administration and use of the CAHPS Child Hospital Survey to assess the inpatient care experiences of pediatric patients and their parents or guardians. Child HCAHPS allows for the tracking of quality improvement within individual hospitals and for the comparison of quality across pediatric settings. Results from the Child HCAHPS survey may provide insights for patients, parents, hospitals, health plans, insurers, and policy makers.
Select to access an overview of the survey instrument and background on the survey development and refinement process (PDF, 540 KB).
