Measuring the quality of hospital doctors through colleague and patient feedback

Abstract The requirement for doctors and other medical professionals to undertake periodic performance evaluation is growing. Tools and techniques for such performance evaluation are at an early stage of development, but it is likely that feedback from colleagues and patients will play an important role. The aim of this paper is to evaluate two feedback tools (CFET for colleague feedback and DISQ for patient feedback) for the purpose of periodic performance evaluation of doctors. The data used in this study came from over 200 doctors currently working in hospital settings within the UK. The results indicate that there is close correspondence between the outcomes of manual screening procedures used by the UK General Medical Council (GMC) and the output from the two feedback tools Also, the paper shows that it is possible to combine colleague and patient feedback for a doctor, thereby extending our knowledge of how screening techniques based on questionnaires can produce a multisource view currently not available to manual screeners. The paper concludes that feedback tools such as CFET and DISQ, provided they are grounded in core aspects of good practice, can function as a first level of screening if and when periodic performance evaluation of large cohorts of doctors is carried out.