Applications and Examples

Preventive services assessed for all women ages 18 and over include:

• Routine physical exam
• Pap smear
• Physical breast exam
• Blood cholesterol test

For women ages 50 and older, age-appropriate services also included mammogram and colon cancer screening. In the CoE study, women are coded "yes" for the screening services if they had received the service during the past one, three or five years depending upon prevailing recommendations.

Topics include:

• Smoking or quitting smoking
• Diet and weight
• Exercise
• Alcohol or drug use
• Calcium intake
• Domestic violence
• Sexually transmitted disease.

For women ages 40 and older, hormone therapy is also included.

The PCSSW is easy to administer.

• It is a brief, 24-item questionnaire.
• It can be self-administered or completed by mail, website or onsite in the office.
• It includes scoring norms from the National Centers of Excellence in Women's Health.

The PCSSW offers separate scores for:

• Communication at the visit
• Administration and office procedures at the visit
• Care coordination and comprehensiveness over the past 12 months

The PCSSW incorporates women’s perspectives in quality measures.

• Addresses women's personal expectations for health care and their common experiences with the health care process
• Recognizes the complex health care experiences women face and the distinct qualities of health care experiences that women value

The PCSSW is designed for women of diverse social and health characteristics and is effective for comparing:

• The quality of care across age, race and ethnicity
• The quality of care across different types of organizational settings and across various women's health centers

• The survey includes a wider range of services, experiences and topics pertaining specifically to women.

While generic patient satisfaction tools are designed to be applicable to all patients regardless of gender, they are not always sensitive to health issues that are unique to women. Successful efforts focused on enhancing quality of care for women requires information from the patient's perspective on how to improve such services to best support women's attempts to lead healthy and productive lives. With this in mind, the PCSSW covers a range of primary care services and experiences, as well as a number of topics that are specific to women or of particular concern to women.

• The survey addresses specific visit and care coordination during the past year.

This component of the PCSSW is particularly innovative because many women seek health care from more than one professional or site. Unlike generic patient satisfaction tools, PCSSW provides women with the option to report two regular physicians. Because the survey is sensitive to specific women's health issues, it eliminates non-gender-specific questions that result in misleading responses.

The PCSSW was developed to assess women's satisfaction with healthcare; the benchmarks and norms are for women patients only.

The PCSSW should not be used to replace a generic patient satisfaction survey of both men and women. Generic surveys are useful to learn the average patient satisfaction across both male and female patients sampled.

The PCSSW can serve as a supplement to these surveys by revealing the extent to which the health care experience at your clinic or practice meets or exceeds the standards used to evaluate the National Centers of Excellence in Women's Health program. The PCSSW can serve as a standalone measure for women's health care topics.

The three scales used in the survey are:

• Communication at the current (or most recent) visit.
• Administration and office procedures at the current (or most recent) visit.
• Care coordination and comprehensiveness over the past 12 months.

The visit-specific scales, which include communication at the visit and administration and office procedures at the visit, assess many of the interpersonal and technical aspects of the quality of care. The care coordination and comprehensiveness scale assesses follow-up care such as getting test result information.

With the combined use of all three scales, the PCSSW adds sensitivity to satisfaction measurement and can be useful in both evaluations of the quality of primary care and in quality improvement programs. Please see the PCSSW User's Manual for more information.

We can provide you with descriptive statistics from the national Center of Excellence evaluation program. Many of these tables and graphs are provided in the User's Manual.

Please contact us for additional information.

The Center collaborates with researchers at the Wake Forest School of Medicine who provide data collection and/or analysis services under individual contracts. The WHQA is dedicated to serving your needs for resource material and information regarding the CoE evaluation tools.