High-quality, client-centered care is at the heart of everything that we do at VHA Home HealthCare (VHA), and after a year like never before, we are both thrilled and relieved to confirm that pandemic challenges did not impact the quality or delivery of our services.

VHA conducts independent Client Experience and Quality Surveys every year to measure client and family satisfaction and to help focus quality and improvement efforts on where they are needed the most. As we navigated the health crisis and launched virtual care in 2020, these metrics were more important than ever before.

Evaluation was completed for occupational therapy, physiotherapy, nursing and personal support services through phone surveys conducted throughout the year, with clients recently discharged from service.

What Did Our Clients Say?

Results from VHA’s 2020 Client Survey

Out of the 735 surveyed clients, an impressive 95% would recommend VHA to others and 97% were satisfied with their services. The majority of client responses were positive with 15/17 questions across all disciplines scoring 90% and above, including the feedback below:

• 96% felt treated with courtesy and respect
•  96% felt visits were arranged at a convenient time
• 95% felt their needs were understood
• 95% felt safe when care was provided
•  94% felt safety concerns were addressed
• 93% felt visits occurred on time
• 92% felt they were listened to carefully
• 91% felt things were explained in a way that was easy to understand
• 90% felt involved in developing their care plan

“These encouraging results confirm that during this unprecedented time, our staff and service providers transcended challenges to continue to deliver client-centered care. Our clients felt supported, understood, respected and above all, safe,” said Kathy Sidhu, Interim Vice President of Quality, Best Practice, Research and Education.

The surveys also identified specific areas to improve on revealing that the continuity of care—or more consistency with service providers—and the need for additional support to prepare for service to end should be a focus for VHA’s Client Experience Improvement Group as they develop a supporting action plan.

What’s Next?

In 2021, we are changing and broadening our approach by sending satisfaction surveys both by email and text to quickly reach the greatest number of people and we are including more of VHA’s services and programs in our evaluation process. In previous years we have rotated the services evaluated but moving forward we will survey across all disciples to allow for more continuous monitoring of performance over the years.

“Thank you to our clients who took the time to complete these surveys and to our staff and service providers for delivering the best possible client and family experiences each and every day. We will continue to share the results of these evaluations and work closely with our 80+ client and family partners to uncover ‘what matters most’ to our clients, how our services can continually evolve to meet these priorities and to identify opportunities for ongoing improvement,” Kathy said.