I’m sick and tired of being surveyed after every interaction with anyone these days, whether it’s my insurance company, a department store, or face cream company asking for a review! No, my wrinkles haven’t magically disappeared, and I just want to be able to make a purchase without it following me for the rest of my natural life.

These companies do mean well, they want to understand how they are doing. But when you ask over and over, people get numb and stop paying attention. What makes it worse is that, in some cases, it’s not clear if anyone cares or looks at the survey results, or does anything about it, whether the feedback is positive or negative.

So how do you cut through all that noise to get patients to fill in your survey, whether it be to fulfil the requirements of accreditation, or for your everyday quality improvement activities in the practice?

Survey fatigue may occur at different points in the survey-taking process. Hence the two main types of survey fatigue are:

1. Pre-Response Survey Fatigue: this is caused by overwhelming the potential respondent before taking the survey and discourages them from giving feedback, due to asking them to give feedback too often.

2. Survey Taking Fatigue: this occurs while a respondent is providing feedback and is triggered by certain elements of the survey (survey length, question types, survey design, etc). It typically results in survey abandonment.

In a recent survey of people who abandoned surveys (yes that’s a thing), the top three responses as to why they abandoned the survey were:

·     The survey was too long.

·     They didn’t feel motivated enough to answer about the topic.

·     They were unsure about the impact of their response.

SO, I guess there are some lessons there about keeping the survey as short as possible and ensuring the respondents are aware of why they are being asked to complete the survey and what will be done with the results.

I am not sure I have the answers for how to address pre-survey fatigue, other than to ensure that within the practice you are not asking for feedback too often. You obviously can’t control the myriad of feedback requests from other sources.

One final suggestion relates to a trend of reduced trust with SMS links which has occurred because of an increase in scams. It is helpful to put notices around the practice and on social media, as well as carefully word the SMS so that the patient can be confident that the request is genuine.Opting to email the request is another solution.