Validating perceptions with clinical measures: A latent growth curve on the associations between patient experience and hospital-associated infections in Norway over time.

Objective: The aim of the study was to examine the parallel relationships between the growth rates of patient-reported experiences and hospital-associated infections (HAIs) over time.

Data sources/study setting: The study employed five waves (years) of data among hospitals across Norway from the Norwegian Health Directorate website for both patient experience and HAIs.

Study design: The study employed a longitudinal design, testing and comparing different models. A latent growth curve model with autoregressions emerged as the best fit for the data.

Data collection/extraction methods: The data extracted from the website included 102 hospitals. However, the study used 61 hospitals after data cleaning, each with 400 patient respondents for each year.

Principal findings: The results showed that for both patient experiences and HAIs, hospitals that recorded higher scores at the starting point experienced a lower growth rate over time compared to hospitals that recorded lower infections at the starting point. Second, it was found that the starting point for patient experience significantly related to the starting point for HAIs, such that the higher the score for patient experience, the lower the score on infections across hospitals. The results also indicated that almost all lagged effects on either patient-reported experience or HAIs were significant.

Conclusions: This study shows the significance of patient experience, not only for patient-reported outcomes but also for clinical outcomes. This thus ascertains the relevance of the patient experience pillar for the other pillars of quality health care, namely, clinical effectiveness and safety.