Purpose:

Feedback from service users is a valuable source for improving the quality of care and services, potentially reflecting the successes and failures in providing empowering healthcare. In supporting empowerment, the multidimensionality of knowledge of service users is assumed to be a crucial factor, yet feedback has not been explored from the perspective of empowering knowledge. In this study, the aim was to analyze the knowledge areas expressed in the service users’ feedback from the point of view of empowering knowledge.

Patients and Methods:

This was a retrospective study utilizing systematically collected service-user feedback from a feedback register of one university hospital district in Finland. Free-form feedback (n = 26,374) along with structured evaluative feedback was given by the patients themselves or their significant others, either by text message or using a feedback form, in 2019. The content of the feedback was analyzed according to the empowering knowledge areas (biophysiological, cognitive, functional, experiential, ethical, social, and financial), quantified, and analyzed statistically in relation to the background characteristics of service users.

Results:

Service users gave multidimensional free-form feedback about the knowledge and educational practices in care and services. In the free-form feedback, the most common empowering knowledge areas were biophysiological and cognitive ones, whilst experiential, ethical, social, and financial areas were the least common. The highest ratings of structured evaluative feedback were associated with the cognitive and ethical areas.

Conclusion:

Register-based feedback is systematic data for quality evaluation. In this study, service users seem to actively evaluate the knowledge procession in care and services, and therefore, they can be actors involved in developing the quality of educational practices. It does, however, indicate a need to add multidimensionality and improve the quality of the knowledge, and by that, advance the potential of empowerment among diverse service users.