Both positive and negative feedback contribute to the continuous improvement of aged care services. Positive feedback recognises and reinforces what is working well, while negative feedback highlights areas for improvement and ensures the service remains responsive to the needs of consumers. In this article I share the results of analysing text responses from positive and negative consumer feedback from the MOA Consumer Feedback Survey for May 2023.
There are two questions that elicit positive and negative feedback about the aged care service. The question used to elicit positive feedback is “What would you say is the best thing about the home?”, while the question used to elicit negative feedback is “What is one thing you would suggest as an improvement for the home?”. There were a total of 0 surveys given out, however, these questions were optional so a minority of residents responded.
I removed common English words that are not of particular interest to the analysis such as ‘the’ and ‘and’. The number of responses in which words appear can give an overall idea of common themes, as illustrated in Figure 1. Staff appears the most in both positive and negative feedback.
An alternative way to display this data, shown in Figure 2, is by looking at how often the most common words appear in negative and positive feedback response. This makes it clear that some words are very rarely used in response to “What is one thing you would suggest as an improvement for the home?”, such as friendly and caring.
Ranking the most common words used in response to “What would you say is the best thing about the home?” and “What is one thing you would suggest as an improvement for the home?”, as illustrated in Figure 3 and Figure 4, respectively, reveals that there are some differences in responses between states, although staff remains the most common topic of both positive and negative feedback. Food is more typically the topic of negative feedback while care is more often the topic of positive feedback.
While staff is commonly the topic of suggestions it is not clear from the above visualisations what the suggestion is since only individual words are shown. However, by looking at two word combinations known as bigrams, a picture starts to emerge. Of the 109 suggestions where staff was either preceded by or followed by a useful descriptor, 62% suggested more staff, using one of the bigrams: more staff, extra staff, staff shortages, increased staff, or staff shortage. This is visualised as a waffle plot in Figure 5. On the other hand, the most common descriptive words that preceded staff in positive feedback were friendly, caring, and helpful.
A similar approach to analysing suggestions related to food reveal that the most common suggestions are improvements to choices, quality, options, and variety. This suggests that aged care consumers want more varied food which includes being able to make choices about the food they eat. The quality of food is also commonly mentioned in suggestions which indicates that there is room for improvement.
The relative prevalence of key themes in suggestions is visualised in Figure 6. The prevalence of key themes in positive feedback is visualised in Figure 7.
