The Hospital Experience: Perception and Memories Across the Lifespan

This work is a mixed-methods study performed to evaluate the variance in patients’ hospital experiences at different stages of life. A survey of patients’ personal experience was designed based on information on healthcare practice from peer-reviewed journals and concepts from the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, 2020). This study examined differences in how patients perceive memories of the hospital at the time of admission to the perception of their memories in the present day. The strength of association between past perceptions of overall experience with various aspects of the hospital experience was analyzed by calculating eta. The percent of variance in perception of experience that is explained by each aspect of the experience was then calculated by eta squared. Results were separated by age group at the time of admission to determine factors most likely to affect each group’s experience. Age groups 10 years and younger and 11-14 years were both concerned with the atmosphere of the hospital. All groups complained about their quality of sleep and the quality of the food, however, a majority of the complaints came from age groups 15-17 years and 18-21 years. The four age groups from 22-35+ years did not have enough participants to draw age specific conclusions by themselves and were therefore combined into one group, 22+ years. The 22+ years age group complained the most about noise, they complained about day noise in addition to night noise.