Patient Satisfaction Survey for Indian Hospitals and Clinics: Questions, Scales, Sampling and Timing

NABH. The 6th edition of the NABH hospital standards, effective 1 January 2025, carries standard PRE.7: "The organisation has a mechanism to capture patient's feedback and to redress complaints." Its objective elements ask for feedback that includes patient satisfaction, a way to capture patient experience, and patients being told how to give feedback or complain. They also ask for review within a defined time frame and corrective action based on the analysis (NABH Accreditation Standards for Hospitals, 6th edition).

Mera Aspataal. The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare launched Mera Aspataal (My Hospital) on 29 August 2016 for public hospitals. It is multilingual and collects feedback by SMS, outbound dialling, a mobile app and a web portal. Integrated hospitals share the phone numbers of the day's outpatients and of inpatients discharged that day, and results appear on a dashboard at facility, district, state and national level (NHSRC, Mera Aspataal).

HCAHPS. The US reference instrument, run by CMS, asks discharged patients 32 questions, 22 of them about the stay itself, between 48 hours and six weeks after discharge (CMS, HCAHPS). Its core items ask how often something happened rather than whether the patient was satisfied, and CMS says the scores should not be used to compare individual staff (HCAHPS fact sheet, April 2022).

None of the three hands you a questionnaire. The shared lessons: cover outpatients too, ask about events, not feelings, and close the loop with a documented action.

Cover eight dimensions, each with an owner who can act on a low score. Six are stages of care: access (front desk), waiting (OPD operations), communication with doctors and nurses (clinical heads), cleanliness and comfort (housekeeping), billing clarity (finance and the insurance desk) and discharge (nursing and pharmacy). The two global items, overall rating and recommendation, belong to management.

Do not skip billing. NABH standard PRE.6 gives patients a right to information on expected costs, and one objective element is that the expected costs are explained to them (NABH, 6th edition). When you shorten the survey, cut inside a dimension rather than dropping one.

Use these as written, then cut to 12 to 15 for a phone survey. Each block keeps one scale. Every question asks about this visit or stay, not the hospital in general.

Access and waiting

Consultation and ward: communication

Cleanliness and comfort

Billing

Discharge and follow-up

Overall

Telehealth add-on

For a diagnostic chain, replace the ward block with three items: sample collected at the booked time, report delivered when promised, and someone explained how to read it.

Frequency scales (never, sometimes, usually, always) suit communication and cleanliness. They ask about events, which is how HCAHPS words its core items (HCAHPS fact sheet).

Yes or no suits process checks: was an estimate given, were instructions written. Add "not applicable" wherever the step may not have happened.

0 to 10 is for the overall rating and the recommendation question only. Report the share who answered 9 or 10, not the average. The NPS methodology guide covers the calculation and its limits.

Four rules hold across blocks: one scale per screen, a label on every point, the worst answer always on the left, and translated labels tested with patients before launch. The Likert scale guide shows how to build and label them.

Inpatients and outpatients are different populations with different questions. Run two short surveys, or route by visit type on the first screen.

At discharge or later? A bedside form gets high scores and little information. The patient is still in the ward, often with staff present, and has not yet seen the bill, read the instructions or taken the medicines at home. HCAHPS waits at least 48 hours and up to six weeks (CMS). Mera Aspataal reaches inpatients on the day of discharge (NHSRC). A practical middle path: the inpatient link one to three days after discharge, the outpatient link the same evening.

Census or sample? Invite every discharge and every outpatient unless your volume is very high; SMS response rates are low. Report a department only when its base is stable; the sample size guide shows what you need. As a benchmark, HCAHPS requires at least 300 completed surveys per hospital over four quarters (HCAHPS fact sheet). Exclude patients who died or were transferred, and do not invite the same patient more than once a quarter.

What we would do. We would start with inpatients only and send the link the second morning after discharge. Outpatients come next, once that loop closes. One department fixed, and patients told, beats a hospital-wide score.

Write the master questionnaire in the language most of your patients speak, then translate it. Back-translate each version, then test it on a phone with five OPD patients. The language choice belongs on the first screen.

Consent. The invite should say who is asking, why, how long it takes, and that answering is optional and will not affect care. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 allows personal data to be processed only for a lawful purpose and with the individual's consent. A notice describing the data and the purpose comes first. Consent can be withdrawn at any time, and for people under 18 a parent or guardian gives it (PRS Legislative Research).

Telehealth. The Telemedicine Practice Guidelines of 25 March 2020 treat consent as implied when the patient starts the consultation. When a health worker, doctor or caregiver starts it, explicit consent is required. Explicit consent can be a text, email or audio or video message, recorded by the doctor (MoHFW, Telemedicine Practice Guidelines). A feedback call is hospital-initiated, so say what it is for and let the patient decline.

Data. Keep the survey separate from the medical record. Store each response against a visit ID, not a name, and share only aggregated tables and anonymised open text. NABH's PRE.7 also expects patients to be told how to give feedback or complain, so print that route on the discharge summary and at the OPD counter (NABH, 6th edition).

Report top-box shares, not averages: the share who said "always" on communication items, "yes" on process items, and 9 or 10 on the two global items. An average hides the quarter of patients who answered "sometimes".

Read the pattern across dimensions. A high overall rating with low billing clarity means clinical care is fine and the estimate process is not. Low waiting scores in one OPD usually point to slot length, not staff.

Cut the data by department and visit type. Do not rank individual doctors on it unless each base is large; CMS says HCAHPS scores are unreliable for comparing individual staff (HCAHPS fact sheet). Read every open-ended answer in the first month; patients name the counter, the time and the person.

Close the loop. NABH's PRE.7 expects review within a defined time frame and corrective action to follow (NABH, 6th edition). Set the time frame in writing, log each action, and tell patients what changed. Our CSAT survey guide covers the same loop for other service businesses.

If your job is feedback from your own patients, your own discharge and OPD lists are the better frame: build this questionnaire on our platform and send the link yourself. Our panel suits a different job: a survey of people who used a hospital, clinic or diagnostic chain recently, found with a screener, for example to compare chains in a city. Screened-out respondents do not count towards your bundle. At list price that panel study costs this.

Pro is sold in bundles of 400 to 1,000 responses and costs 20% less per response than Plus. Enterprise plans come with a dedicated research team and are priced on request.

The SuperJ network has 2 crore Indian respondents. The survey-eligible panel is a subset, and availability depends on your targeting. Members complete Aadhaar-based KYC once, and each study receives a zero-knowledge proof of verification. Surveys run in as many Indian languages as the study needs. Quality checks flag speeders, straight-lining and inconsistent answers. Read /panel-methodology and pricing.

The limit: the app reaches smartphone users only, so patients without a smartphone, and many elderly inpatients, need a phone call or a face-to-face interview from your own staff.