Although hospitals often survey adult inpatients and family members about their hospital experience as a measure of care quality under the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS), it's been difficult to capture information about the experience at children's hospitals because until now there hasn't been a publicly available standardized measure to collect, evaluate and share information about children's hospital experience. But members of the Center of Excellence for Pediatric Quality Measurement (CEPQM) at Boston's Children's Hospital have developed a child HCAHPS tool to allow collection, comparison and benchmarking of patient experience data across hospitals. They describe the tool, which includes 18 measures that allow parents and caregivers to rate their and their children's experience as hospital inpatients, in an article recently published in Pediatrics. The measurement tool will help provide better care for children and families across the country, senior study author Mark Schuster, M.D., Ph.D., director of the CEPQM and chief of the Division of General Pediatrics at Boston Children's, said in a study announcement. "This is about family engagement in the process and giving families a voice in the effort to measure and improve quality," he said. "It's about encouraging hospital clinicians to better serve families by talking to them about side effects, going over what to do when they get home and treating people with respect." Study abstract