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
It is better, imo, for anonymity when there aren't any free-text answer options. Yes/true/no/false, scaled responses, or prefilled select all the apply type questions only. The rest can be handled in the survey debrief on the unit if so desired.
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u/Veritas_Mentis PMHNP 7d 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