We take our clients' comments seriously here at THE pt GROUP. So seriously, in fact, that we invite each and every one of our clients to complete a satisfaction survey at some point during their course of care. We believe in listening to the voices of our clients, and make every effort to address issues when they happen. While it's great to hear wonderful comments, we truly want to hear about our-shortcomings so that we can continually improve our service delivery. By focusing on our processes instead of placing blame on people, we really can get better than ever at doing what we do best, that is, providing high quality rehabilitation services to all our clients.

During 1997, we initiated the use of a scanner to automate and facilitate the client satisfaction measurement tool in all of our clinical sites. With our continued expansion to multiple geographic locations, we obviously needed to streamline the data collection in order to increase our response rates so that statistically meaningful, helpful results could be analyzed. In a six-month period, clients received rehabilitation services in our numerous clinical locations shared their perceptions with us. We use a numeric scale to mathematically quantify those perceptions, ranging from 1, defined as "poor," to 5, described as "excellent." During this six-month period, the responding clients rated their satisfaction with the overall quality of care by the staff at 4.70, just 0.3 of a point shy of PERFECT!! We're extremely pleased with the respondents' scores, and obviously very proud of all our clinical and administrative team members. Without their skills, expertise and professionalism, this commendable rating from our clients would not be possible.

So do we intend to stop measuring our clients' levels of satisfaction? After all, that's a pretty tough score to beat! We strongly believe, that our organization can continue to strive for perfection, and we sincerely want to get better at satisfying all of our customers. So we continue to survey not only our clients, but also their referring physicians and even our internal customers, our employees. We're open and receptive to ideas, suggestions and constructive input. This can and will strengthen THE pt GROUP, an ongoing goal of this organization.

Cindy Carasia is the Director of Continuous Quahty Improvement for THE pt GROUP and is a Certified Professional ih Healthcare Quality.