Hooray for 84 percent response rate!

By ​Monica Bukkøy Kjetland, Lovisenberg Diaconal Hospital, Oslo, Norway

​Last weekend we closed the Magnet4Europe survey for our employees. We received an overall response rate of 84% (300 employees), and thus believe that our communication strategy was a success. The response rate for each employee group - physicians (n=80) and nurses (n=220) – ended on 84 percent. Since a high response rate is one of the success criteria for the project, we are happy to share our motivation strategy with you. 

Information for managers and employees
The survey was conducted in our Medical and Surgical clinic, which includes eight wards. We started informing the clinic managers and the unit managers in meetings and emails well in advance. During the survey, we updated them on current response rate among nurses and physicians twice a week. 
​We developed a 4-minute short animated film describing the project and the survey. One week before we opened the survey, we published it on the hospital’s intranet, and encouraged the unit managers to show the film to the employees. They showed the film at meetings and forwarded the link to the film via email for publication on local information channels.

A nurse watching the ​ information film.

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​Prior to starting the survey, we were concerned that registration requirements regarding personal information might contribute to uncertainty about anonymity and lead to a lower response. Thus, we decided to clarify how the data would be stored as well as describe in detail the Memplis registration requirements. We provided contact details to the hospital’s Research Director if anyone had questions regarding privacy and data protection. The purpose was that the registration would not come as a surprise to the employee and that the prior information would put the respondents at ease.

Involvement and anchoring
In order to express the importance of the survey to the hospital, both clinic managers sent out invitations to each college sampled for the survey, including a message underlining the importance of their responses for the hospital's future development.

Physician in the project group together with physicians in the emergency medical unit.

​Motivational work
We used local motivators in each unit, both nurses and physicians, to remind colleagues to participate in the survey. We believe local motivators was more effective than a more peripheral project manager. The clinic managers sent each colleague in the study sample a weekly reminder with the current status of the response rate (visually presented with a picture and graph). Relatively early, we saw a higher response rate for physicians than nurses, which surprised us. This provided an opportunity to encourage competition between the employee groups – and in the end, the nurses managed to catch up to the physicians, matching their response rate. :-) 

​A unit made a lottery: Employees who had responded to the survey could voluntarily sign up for a list. One employee would later be drawn from the list to receive a prize.

Otherwise, it is important to point out that our hospital (and Norway in general) had control over the pandemic situation in the period when the survey was conducted. Hospital activities went relatively as normal. We had only 7-10 Covid patients admitted to the during the survey period.

Unit manager awarding the prize to one of the nurses who responded to the survey

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