About the Canadian Patient Experiences Survey — Inpatient Care

The Canadian Patient Experiences Survey on Inpatient Care (CPES-IC) (ZIP) is a standardized tool created by CIHI that hospitals use to receive feedback from their patients about the quality of care they received during their most recent stay in a Canadian acute care hospital.

The CPES-IC helps hospitals learn about patients’ experiences with care. It can support quality improvements, and it provides a platform for national comparisons and benchmarking for the measurement of patient experience. It gathers information about patients’ experiences in the following areas:

• Admission process
• Communication(s)
• Involvement in decisions and respect for patient’s preferences
• Coordination of care
• Discharge process
• Overall experience of care

CIHI has modernized the CPES-IC (originally launched in 2014). The modernized version will continue to inform quality improvement initiatives in patient-centred care and will improve flexibility for jurisdictions and hospitals (through survey tool options) to meet their patient experience information needs.  
The following survey options are available for hospitals and jurisdictions to use:

• Canadian Patient Experiences Survey — Inpatient Care — 20 Measures (CPES-IC-20M): The comprehensive CPES-IC includes 41 questions: 33 questions for gathering information from Canadian acute care patients on their experience during a recent hospital stay, 7 demographic questions and 1 open-ended question. Descriptions of the measures for the CPES-IC-20M will be made available in spring 2024.
• Canadian Patient Experiences Survey — Inpatient Care — 6 Measures (CPES-IC-6M): A subset of the CPES-IC-20M, the 6M includes 22 questions: 14 experience questions, 7 demographic questions and 1 open-ended question. It collects information to calculate 6 patient-reported experience measures: Communication With Nurses, Communication With Doctors, Information and Understanding When Leaving the Hospital, Involvement in Decision-Making and Treatment Options, Overall Hospital Experience and Internal Coordination of Care.
• Canadian Patient Experiences Survey — Inpatient Care (January 2019 version): This version of the CPES-IC will remain in effect until spring 2025 to allow hospitals time to transition to the CPES-IC-20M and/or 6M.

The bilingual surveys have been cognitively tested and validated in the field and are endorsed by Accreditation Canada for patient experience surveying. 

Learn more about the development of the survey.