Best questions for patient survey about patient safety

Here are some of the best questions for a patient survey about patient safety, plus simple tips on how to design each type. With Specific, you can build a smart, AI-powered survey in seconds.

Best open-ended questions for patient survey about patient safety

Open-ended questions give patients the freedom to share detailed personal experiences, new concerns, and constructive suggestions—unfiltered by preset choices. These questions are invaluable when you want honest feedback, nuanced stories, or to uncover issues you never expected.

Benefits: You get rich qualitative data and can spot recurring themes, but it’s crucial to analyze these efficiently—which modern AI tools can handle.

Here are 10 excellent open-ended questions to use in a patient safety survey:

1. Can you describe a time when you felt unsafe or uncomfortable during your care?

2. What practices or behaviors made you feel most safe while receiving treatment?

3. Were there moments when you felt staff could have communicated more clearly about your care?

4. Is there anything that could have been done differently to make your care experience safer?

5. How easy was it for you to voice concerns or ask questions about your safety?

6. Have you witnessed or experienced any errors or near misses? Please elaborate.

7. What information was missing (or delivered too late) that would have helped you understand your safety?

8. Are there specific actions our team took that gave you confidence in your safety?

9. Can you think of ways we could improve patient safety processes or communication?

10. What advice would you give to new patients about staying safe in our facility?

Why does this matter? Globally, about 1 in every 10 patients is harmed during care—and hearing direct patient stories is one of the fastest ways to identify preventable issues. [1]

Best single-select multiple-choice questions for patient survey about patient safety

Single-select multiple-choice questions are perfect when you need to quantify trends, establish benchmarks, or break the ice before following up with deeper discussion. They’re especially useful for busy patients: instead of thinking through a long response, patients can quickly pick the closest option, making it easier to respond. Plus, these set you up for specific, actionable follow-up questions.

Question: How safe did you feel during your hospital stay?

• Very safe

• Somewhat safe

• Not very safe

• Not at all safe

Question: Did staff clearly discuss the risks and benefits of your treatment?

• Always

• Sometimes

• Rarely

• Never

Question: Where did you feel your safety was most at risk during your visit?

• During procedures or surgery

• While taking medication

• During discharge and instructions

• Other

When to follow up with "why"? When a patient selects a negative or unexpected answer (“Not at all safe”), always ask why. This helps surface the underlying cause. For example: If someone picks “Not at all safe,” follow up with, “Can you tell us more about what made you feel this way?” This kind of targeted probing often uncovers actionable, previously hidden issues.

When and why to add the "Other" choice? Always add "Other" if there’s any chance your list of options might not cover every patient’s reality. Allowing patients to describe their unique experience lets you catch issues or scenarios that you hadn’t anticipated, unlocking new insights with smart AI follow-ups.

By the way, a 2018 federal report in the U.S. showed that 43% of hospital harm was preventable—so capturing these details can drive meaningful improvements. [3]

NPS question: measuring overall patient safety sentiment

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) isn’t just for customer satisfaction—it’s powerful for patient safety too. By asking patients how likely they are to recommend your facility (or a specific service) based on their feeling of safety, you get a clear, quantitative measure of overall trust and confidence. The NPS format also makes it easy to pair numerical results with open-ended follow-ups, so you can learn what drives each score.

Want to generate an NPS survey for patient safety? You can create that instantly with Specific.

The power of follow-up questions

One of the most important innovations in modern surveys—especially for a sensitive topic like patient safety—is real-time, automated follow-up questions. Automated AI follow-ups, as explained in our feature deep dive, enable surveys to adapt on the fly, digging into patient replies and clarifying uncertainties right when the respondent is engaged.

Specific surveys make full use of these, powered by context. Instead of broad, generic follow-ups, the AI listens and asks for more detail only when needed.

• Patient: “I felt a bit worried about my medication.”

• AI follow-up: “Can you tell us more about what concerned you with your medication—was it timing, side effects, or something else?”

Contrast this with static surveys: a vague answer is just left there, with no path to clarity.

How many followups to ask? In our experience, 2–3 focused follow-ups strike the perfect balance. This is enough to clarify and deepen the insight but not so many that patients feel overwhelmed. With Specific, you can set this limit and let respondents skip further probing once you’ve captured what's needed.

This makes it a conversational survey: The back-and-forth turns sterile forms into conversations, building trust and surfacing richer detail. It's a more human way of collecting data.

AI survey analysis: Even with all these open-ended, conversational responses, AI makes it easy to analyze the results. You can see how with Specific’s AI-powered response analysis tool that transforms patient words into clear, actionable insights.

These smart, dynamic follow-ups are still new to many survey creators—so we encourage you to try generating a conversational patient survey and see the difference.

Prompting ChatGPT to generate great patient safety survey questions

You can use AI like ChatGPT to design your patient safety survey in seconds. The best results come when you give it context about your goals and audience.

Start with a basic prompt:

Suggest 10 open-ended questions for patient survey about patient safety.

But don’t stop there! Providing more context leads to better, more tailored questions. You might instead say:

I’m running a patient survey about patient safety in a medium-sized urban hospital. The goal is to uncover both common and rare safety issues, particularly during discharge. Please suggest the 10 most insightful questions for this context.

Next, ask the AI to organize its suggestions into categories for greater clarity:

Look at the questions and categorize them. Output categories with questions under each.

Pick the categories you care about most—perhaps “Medication Safety” or “Communication”—and dive deeper:

Generate 10 survey questions specifically focused on Communication during patient care.

This iterative prompting helps create a comprehensive, highly relevant survey in minutes.

What is a conversational survey?

A conversational survey mimics natural back-and-forth, rather than feeling like a sterile form. In a conversational survey, each answer can trigger a smart follow-up, diving deeper and generating richer insight—especially in complex, emotional domains like patient safety.

AI survey generation means you can instantly go from idea to live, smart survey—no manual drag-and-drop, no tedious copy-pasting of questions—just describe what you want and the survey is ready to use. Even better, AI adjusts follow-ups based on the actual words of respondents.

Why use AI for patient surveys? Completion rates are much higher when surveys adjust to respondents and feel human—AI-powered surveys boast rates up to 90% compared to 10-30% for old-school methods. Sentiment analysis and advanced AI tools now let you find patterns and pain points with 95% accuracy and up to 60% faster than traditional reviews. [4][5]

Specific delivers industry-best conversational survey technology with a simple, intuitive user experience. That means engaging feedback for respondents—and insightful, theme-based analysis for you. If you need a deep dive on how to design and launch your own AI-powered patient safety survey, we explain every step.

See this patient safety survey example now

Try a conversational patient safety survey with AI-powered follow-ups and expert-level analysis—get deep insights quickly and make your next patient survey feel like a real conversation.