The questionnaire arrives in the mail a few days after a patient's discharge from the hospital.
Did doctors treat you respectfully? Was your bathroom kept clean?
Most of the queries seem mundane, but a backlash has been growing against one: Did staff members do everything they could for your pain?
Like countless other businesses, hospitals use customer surveys to improve their reputations, target areas for improvement and provide measures for determining employees' promotions and raises. But as the country struggles to control the epidemic of overdoses and deaths from prescription opioids, many medical professionals and policy makers are challenging the wisdom of asking patients to rate how hospital employees manage pain. Doing so, they argue, creates a dangerous incentive for doctors to prescribe powerful and potentially addictive painkillers.
