That is very interesting.
The practice we go to in Cairns undertook a survey of customers a few months ago by means of a pile of A4 pages with questions on them and I was very suspicious that there was an ulterior motive, especially due to my knowledge of one of the GP’s revenue boosting tactics.
Your post obviously addresses my suspicions.
If a practice wants to remain QA standard certified (don’t ask me which standard) they will do this from time to time. If they are doing this, the questions should be about how well you think the practice does certain things.
My understanding is that most GP software sends data back to the company that sells it - which may be as bad as or worse than sending it to government.
More broadly, we need to keep in mind that data is a double-edged sword. Good data, well collected, can be used to achieve things that cannot otherwise be done - from landing on the moon to designing a robot vacuum cleaner.
Of course, we need to consider who is collecting the data, the stated purpose, and whether the data they are collecting matches that purpose. One example of the Commonwealth’s failure to collect data wisely is the demand for people to record their names on census records. Where is the value? You don’t build roads, schools and hospitals based on a person’s name! You are effectively asking people to lie, because as soon as they think you’re collecting data for nefarious purposes that is what they will do. The Australian Bureau of Statistics knew this, but was over-ridden.
We have been going to these doctors for decades and they have never undertaken a survey but I am aware of some of their other practices.
Where there is smoke, there is fire?
(Kindly excuse the saying in light of the current bushfire crisis.)
All the data they want for this program is contained in patient records either on paper files or more often now in digital form. Filling in a survey may be part of that practice’s means of filling in some blanks about patients that they don’t have the data on for the Improvement Measures if it clearly identifies who is completing the survey and if that data is then added to your record.
Or it may just be a quality assurance exercise as @postulative notes. The questions they ask you would certainly answer for what reason the survey was carried out.
The rules for the PIP QI data extraction and de-identifying are quite exhaustively explained in the documentation. No identifying data is allowed to be passed from the practice to the rest of the system. It also allows a patient to withdraw their consent to their data being used in the process, and where a patient because of numbers could be identified the system is supposed to remove them from the collection.
This of course is where it is not actually clear if patients are made aware that their data is being used, or if they have been told of their right to withdraw consent, or if the practice has taken the needed steps to ensure that a particular patient who could be identified has been excluded by the data sieving.
