The experiences of patients hospitalized during the COVID-19 pandemic was significantly worse than in the years before the crisis, with hospitals with higher staffing levels holding on to better scores longer, according to a new RAND Corporation study.
was seen in every region of the U.S., with relatively little regional variation," said Marc Elliott, the study's lead author and a senior principal researcher at RAND, a nonprofit research organization."Hospitals with higher staffing levels and better overall pre-pandemic quality were more resilient and slower to see their decline. But eventually even their patients also reported worse experiences.
To examine how the pandemic-era changes affected patient experiences, the RAND study analyzed responses to the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Health Care Providers and Systems survey, which is routinely administered to patients treated at the nation's short-term acute care hospitals following their discharge.
The analysis found that by the fourth quarter of 2021, a summary measure of patient experiences was 3.6 percentage points lower across all hospitals than would have been expected without the pandemic—considered a medium effect size for patient experience measures.
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