Patient feedback and NPS survey template for hospitals (free)

A good patient feedback form asks the 0 to 10 recommendation question, one open ‘main reason’ question and five to ten driver questions on doctor communication, waiting time, nursing, cleanliness, billing clarity and discharge. Send it on WhatsApp within hours of an OPD visit or discharge, call every detractor within a day or two, and invite all patients, not just happy ones, to review you on Google.

Every hospital collects feedback. Most of it sits in a drawer, a spreadsheet nobody opens, or a dashboard that shows a satisfaction score of 4.6 out of 5 every month regardless of what is happening on the wards. The problem is rarely the lack of a form. It is asking the wrong questions at the wrong time, collecting answers that cannot be acted on, and never calling back the patient who had a bad experience.

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This guide explains how to run a patient feedback programme that works in an Indian hospital or clinic: what Net Promoter Score (NPS) can and cannot tell you, when and how to ask, the exact questions for OPD and inpatient (IPD) patients, how to close the loop with unhappy patients, how to invite happy ones to leave public reviews without breaking Google’s rules, and how to report it. There is a free template you can download and use straight away.

Free download: patient feedback and NPS survey template

Download the free patient feedback and NPS survey template (Word) and the NPS calculator (Excel). It contains:

• A Word document with a ready-to-use OPD questionnaire (9 questions), an IPD questionnaire (14 questions), a day-7 follow-up message, consent and privacy wording, and scripts for detractor callbacks and review invitations.
• An Excel workbook with a response log, an automatic NPS calculator (overall, by department, by doctor and by month), driver question averages, a detractor follow-up tracker with turnaround time, and a monthly summary sheet you can paste into a management report.

The question wording below matches the template, so you can read the article and use the file side by side.

What is NPS, and what does it actually tell a hospital?

Net Promoter Score asks one question: “How likely are you to recommend [hospital] to a friend or family member?” on a scale of 0 to 10. Respondents who answer 9 or 10 are promoters, 7 or 8 are passives and 0 to 6 are detractors. NPS is the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors, so it ranges from minus 100 to plus 100.

For example, if 200 patients respond and 120 give 9 or 10, 50 give 7 or 8, and 30 give 0 to 6, then promoters are 60 percent, detractors are 15 percent and NPS is 45.

What NPS is good for

• A single, simple number that leadership can track month on month.
• Comparing your own departments, sites and shifts against each other.
• Spotting a sudden drop that signals something has gone wrong (a new billing system, a staffing gap, a broken lift).
• Identifying the individual unhappy patients who need a call back today.

What NPS does not tell you

• Why. A score of 6 tells you nothing about whether the problem was the doctor, the wait or the bill. That is the job of driver questions.
• Clinical quality. A patient can be delighted with care that was clinically average, or unhappy with excellent care that came with a long wait. NPS is about experience, not outcomes. Never present it as a quality-of-care measure.
• Comparisons with other hospitals. Published “healthcare NPS benchmarks” mix countries, settings and survey methods. Compare against yourself over time.
• Anything reliable from tiny samples. An NPS from 15 responses swings wildly. See the sample size section below.

Treat NPS as a smoke alarm and the driver questions as the map of the building. You need both.

When should a hospital ask for patient feedback?

Timing changes the answer. A patient asked while still waiting for their bill will answer differently from one asked a week later at home. Use three touchpoints.

Do not send feedback requests to patients after a death, a serious adverse event, or when a complaint is already open. Build an exclusion flag into your process so the system does not send an automated “How did we do?” to a grieving family. Also exclude emergency cases that were transferred out, and medico-legal cases, from automated surveys.

Which channel works best for patient surveys in India?

WhatsApp tends to be the first choice in India because patients already use it with the hospital for reports and reminders. But no single channel reaches everyone, and some patients will answer only when asked in person.

If you are setting up WhatsApp for this, the WhatsApp Business API guide for hospitals covers templates and opt-in, and the guide to automating patient follow-up after OPD shows how feedback fits into the post-visit message sequence.

What questions should a patient feedback form include?

Keep it short. Every extra question lowers the completion rate. The OPD form should take under two minutes; the IPD form under four. Use the same scales every time so trends are comparable.

The core NPS question (OPD and IPD)

Q1. “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend [Hospital name] to a friend or family member who needs similar care?” (0 = Not at all likely, 10 = Extremely likely)

Q2. “What is the main reason for your score?” (Open text, optional)

Put the open question immediately after the score. The reason is often more useful than the number.

For the next step, see Hospital marketing KPI dashboard: free Google Sheets template, Patient acquisition strategy for hospitals: the full-funnel playbook for India and What is cost per treated patient, and why cost per lead misleads.

OPD driver questions

Each rated on a 5-point scale: 1 = Very poor, 2 = Poor, 3 = Average, 4 = Good, 5 = Excellent, plus “Not applicable”.

1. Ease of booking your appointment (phone, WhatsApp, website or app).
2. Waiting time between your appointment time and seeing the doctor.
3. How clearly the doctor explained your condition and next steps.
4. Whether the doctor gave you enough time to ask questions.
5. Courtesy and helpfulness of front desk and billing staff.
6. Clarity of charges and billing before and after the consultation.
7. Cleanliness of the waiting area and washrooms.

IPD driver questions

Same 5-point scale.

1. Admission process: speed and clarity.
2. How clearly doctors explained your condition, treatment plan and progress.
3. Responsiveness of nursing staff when you or your attendant needed help.
4. Courtesy and respect shown by nurses and support staff.
5. Cleanliness of your room and washroom.
6. Quality and timeliness of food.
7. Clarity of the cost estimate and updates on the bill during your stay.
8. Insurance or TPA process support (if applicable).
9. Discharge process: time taken and clarity.
10. Clarity of discharge instructions: medicines, diet, warning signs and follow-up.

Final questions

“Would you like someone from our patient relations team to contact you about your experience?” (Yes / No). And for IPD: “Is there a staff member you would like to thank by name?” (Open text). Staff recognition from patients is one of the most motivating things a hospital can share internally.

Notice what is missing: no questions about clinical outcome, no demographic profiling, no diagnosis field. You already know who the patient is from the visit record; the survey link should carry an anonymised visit ID so you do not need to ask again.

How do you close the loop with detractors?

The single most valuable thing a feedback programme does is find the unhappy patient while there is still time to help. A detractor called back within a day, listened to and given a clear answer often becomes loyal. One who is ignored writes a one-star review.

1. Alert. Any score of 0 to 6, or any driver score of 1 or 2, triggers an alert to patient relations and the department head the same day.
2. Call within 24 hours for IPD, 48 hours for OPD. Use a trained patient relations person, not the doctor involved, for the first call.
3. Listen first. Ask what happened, repeat it back, apologise for the experience without arguing.
4. Fix what can be fixed. A billing query resolved, a report sent, a follow-up appointment arranged with a different time.
5. Record the root cause in a fixed category (waiting, communication, billing, nursing, cleanliness, food, discharge, other) so you can count themes monthly.
6. Close formally. Log the outcome and date closed. Track turnaround time as a KPI.

Avoid offering refunds or discounts in exchange for changing a rating or removing a review. That is both ethically wrong and against review platform policies. If a complaint involves clinical care, route it through your formal grievance and clinical governance process, not through marketing. For handling issues that are already public, the crisis communication guide for hospitals is the right reference.

Can you send happy patients to Google reviews?

Yes, but not selectively. A common practice called “review gating” sends patients a survey first, then shows a “Review us on Google” link only to those who scored high, while routing unhappy patients to a private form. Google’s prohibited and restricted content policy for Maps reviews says businesses should not discourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers. Gated flows can lead to reviews being removed.

The ethical and compliant approach:

• Invite all patients (or a random set) to leave a review, regardless of their survey score, in a separate message from the survey.
• Keep the wording neutral: “We would value your honest review on Google” rather than “If you were happy, please review us”.
• Never offer incentives, discounts or free services for reviews.
• Never have staff write reviews or ask patients to post from staff phones.
• Still follow up with detractors privately, because that is service recovery, not gating.

In practice, many hospitals simply send the review invitation to everyone a few hours after the feedback survey, so the survey answer does not decide who is asked. The patient reviews strategy guide covers volume, steady pace and how to respond to reviews, including negative ones, without disclosing patient information.

How many responses do you need, and what response rate is realistic?

NPS is a percentage difference, so small samples are noisy. As a rough illustration, with around 100 responses a monthly NPS can move by 10 points or more from random variation alone. With a few hundred responses, it becomes far more stable. Practical guidance:

• Report a department’s NPS only when it has at least 30 responses in the period; below that, report “insufficient data” and read the comments instead.
• For doctor-level NPS, use a rolling 3-month or 6-month window, and never use it alone for performance decisions.
• Show the number of responses next to every NPS figure on the dashboard.

Response rates vary widely by channel, question length and how the patient was treated, so measure your own baseline in the first month rather than relying on industry figures. Things that reliably help: sending within hours, not days; saying how long it takes (“2 minutes”); using the doctor’s or hospital’s name in the message; and keeping the first question tappable on the phone.

Watch for non-response bias. If only 5 percent of patients reply, those who reply may be unusually happy or unhappy. Periodic phone surveys of a random sample help check whether your digital NPS reflects reality.

How to measure it: the hospital feedback dashboard

A useful dashboard fits on one page and answers four questions: how are we doing, where are we weak, who needs a call, and is it improving? You can build it in Google Sheets or Looker Studio from the response log in the template.

One technique that makes driver questions actionable is a simple driver analysis: for each driver, compare its average score among promoters with its average among detractors. The drivers with the largest gap are usually the ones moving your NPS. If billing clarity averages 4.5 among promoters and 2.4 among detractors, while food averages 3.9 and 3.6, fix billing first.

What good looks like

• Every detractor gets a call, most within a day.
• Department heads see their own scores and comments every month and present one fix.
• The top detractor theme changes over time because the previous one was fixed.
• Google review volume grows steadily from honest, non-gated invitations.
• Feedback data feeds marketing, too: recurring praise tells you what to say in ads and on doctor profile pages, and recurring complaints tell you what to fix before spending more on acquisition.

DPDP Act: consent and privacy for patient feedback

A feedback survey processes personal data (who visited, when, with whom), and its free-text answers often contain health information. Under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, processing needs a lawful basis, people must be told what their data is used for, and data should be kept only as long as needed. The DPDP Rules, 2025 were notified in November 2025 and come into force in phases. Practical steps:

• Tell patients at registration that they may receive a short feedback request and how to opt out.
• Include a one-line privacy notice in the survey itself (the template includes wording).
• Use a visit ID in survey links rather than names, phone numbers or diagnoses in the URL.
• Restrict who can see free-text comments that may contain health details.
• Get explicit consent before quoting any patient comment publicly, even anonymously. See patient stories with consent.
• Set a retention period for raw responses (for example, 24 months) and aggregate after that.

For broader guidance, see DPDP Act and hospital marketing. This is not legal advice; have your privacy counsel review the notice and retention period.

Mistakes to avoid

• Long forms. Thirty questions guarantees low response and rushed answers.
• Surveying at the billing counter. Staff presence inflates scores; patients still waiting on bills deflate them.
• Changing scales and wording every few months. You lose the ability to see trends.
• Collecting scores and never calling detractors. This is the biggest wasted opportunity.
• Using NPS to punish individual doctors on small samples. It creates pressure to game the survey.
• Review gating. Showing the Google review link only to happy patients breaches Google’s policy.
• Staff asking patients for a “10”. Coaching invalidates the data. Make it a clear rule.
• Treating NPS as clinical quality. Experience and outcomes are different things and need different measures.
• Sending surveys after deaths or serious events. Always use exclusion flags.

Where to start

Download the template, pick one setting (OPD is easiest), and run it for one month via WhatsApp with a short message sent a few hours after each visit. Set up the detractor alert and callback process before you send the first survey, not after. At the end of the month, review the response log, the top three detractor themes and one department’s comments with its head. Then add IPD. The free OPD growth checklist is a useful companion for turning the first month’s themes into fixes. A feedback programme earns its keep through the calls and fixes it triggers, and those also improve the numbers marketing cares about: OPD growth, repeat visits and the reviews new patients read before they choose.

Frequently asked questions