The development of The Royal College of Surgeons of England's patient satisfaction audit service.

Clinical auditing is now well recognized as an effective way of ensuring the highest quality of surgical services by ensuring that practice is recorded, reviewed and made accountable. Surgeons increasingly see this as necessarily involving the monitoring of 'consumer feedback' by patients. Taking the initiative to encourage its membership to recognize these issues, in 1990 The Royal College of Surgeons of England Surgical Audit Unit (RCS) embarked upon a three year project to investigate the patient's experience of surgery and surgeons, and to develop an 'audit instrument' to record their routine evaluation. A two-stage pilot study provided information on response rates, question validation and the methodology required to run such studies routinely as audits. This is now offered to UK hospitals as a patient satisfaction audit service.