Nursing Home Survey on Patient Safety Culture

This chapter presents descriptive information on how the 2011 database nursing homes conducted survey administration.

The 2011 database consists of survey data from 226 nursing homes with a total of 16,155 nursing home staff respondents. Participating nursing homes administered the nursing home survey to their staff between January 2008 and February 2011 and voluntarily submitted their data for inclusion in the database. All nursing homes but one administered the survey to all staff or a sample of all staff from all nursing home departments. 

Overall statistics for nursing homes included in the 2011 database are shown in Table 2-1. An average of 71 completed surveys were submitted per nursing home (range: 10 to 1,187), with an average nursing home response rate of 67 percent (range: 8 to 100 percent). 

Table 2-2 presents data on the type of survey administration mode (paper, Web, or mixed mode).

Table 2-3 shows average response rate by survey mode. Paper survey administration had a higher average response rate than Web or mixed mode. It is therefore still an overall recommendation that nursing homes conduct the nursing home survey as a paper survey. But each nursing home should consider its prior experience with survey modes and response rates when determining which mode is best.