In 2011 APHCRI was engaged by the Australian Medicare Local Alliance (AML Alliance) to develop a toolkit to evaluate nursing care in general practice. The PESS was developed as a part of this toolkit. The survey was adapted from existing tools and then validated and its reliability established specifically for the Australian practice nurse context.  Version 1 of the PESS as well the PESS example and the How to PESS, documents developed to support its use, are available on the AML Alliance website.

The PESS was piloted in two Australian general practices.  Findings from the pilot and a further review of the international literature led to the development of version 2 of the survey (PESS version 2). The PESS version 2 includes questions that also examine general practice characteristics and practice nurse consultation characteristics that have been found to in influence patients’ satisfaction and enablement arising from GP care; however these factors have not been examined in relation to nursing care.  This survey is currently being used to inform Jane Desborough’s PhD research examining the influence of general practice characteristics and practice nurse consultation characteristics on patient satisfaction and enablement.

The original version of this survey was developed as part of a collaborative project between the Australian Primary Health Care Research Institute, Australian National University (Desborough, Banfield and Parker) and the Australian Medicare Local Alliance 2012 (Funded by the Australian Government).

Related publications

• Jane Desborough, Michelle Banfield, Rhian Parker, (2013), A tool to evaluate patients’ experience of nursing care in Australian general practice: Development of the Patient Enablement and Satisfaction Survey (PESS), Australian Journal of Primary Health, accepted 8 February 2013, published online 8 March 2013.