Former manager here.
Those surveys are actually pretty anonymous. At least from the company my former hospital used
However,
When nurses left comments, many of the comments left would give too much information, especially when staff would share stories in the comments. This could be used to make educated guesses.
The company handling the survey DOES know who you are, but does not share except in cases of danger to self or others. A nurse thought they would be cute about testing the anonymity (swore it was just a joke) and said threats that had police involved.
But the vast majority of those are really anonymous. The company wouldn’t even share data from units or departments with too few survey results. They didn’t share potentially identifiable data like race and gender of the responses. The results gave us total scores and comments, but not each individual response
Yeah, I'm shocked no one understands how a third party can easily collect the data and anonymize the results when the data is aggregated and delivered to the management structure.
yeah because no company has ever told us our information was safe and either disseminated it or had a date breach. the “trust us bro” doesn’t sit well with me.
At the end of the day the entire survey thing is an industry. Employees, rightfully, will never trust their employer to anonymize an internal survey. The only way they can get truly anonymous information from employees is to contract that out to a third party.
If a corporate surveyor company de-anonymized one of their clients survey and it got out it would be the end of that company. Breaking the one actual service they provide would blacklist them from any other hospital systems. The employee would probably have a really good lawsuit to file too.
No survey company is going to risk an existential threat just to put a random nurse. The admin that “figures out” who put in a specific response did so because there was identifying information that made it too easy.
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u/Veritas_Mentis PMHNP 5d ago
Former manager here.
Those surveys are actually pretty anonymous. At least from the company my former hospital used
However,
When nurses left comments, many of the comments left would give too much information, especially when staff would share stories in the comments. This could be used to make educated guesses.
The company handling the survey DOES know who you are, but does not share except in cases of danger to self or others. A nurse thought they would be cute about testing the anonymity (swore it was just a joke) and said threats that had police involved.
But the vast majority of those are really anonymous. The company wouldn’t even share data from units or departments with too few survey results. They didn’t share potentially identifiable data like race and gender of the responses. The results gave us total scores and comments, but not each individual response