A legislative-mandated push to find out if health care professionals in Florida trust the hospitals where they work has yet to be put in place three years after it was ordered.
Lawmakers in 2020 passed a bill that required hospitals and ambulatory surgical centers to survey their staff members about the places they work and to report the information to the state.
But the information won’t be available until sometime in 2026.
That’s because the Gov. Ron DeSantis administration has been slow to implement the rules necessary to make it happen. And on Monday, a top health care regulator put the blame, in part, on the public health emergency associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.
DeSantis ended Florida’s public health emergency stemming associated with the pandemic more than two years ago, in June 2021.
“I’m not going to stand up here and make excuses. In March of 2020 in the Session in which this passed we all knew what was going on. Me and my team, it was all hands on deck,” said Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) Deputy Secretary Kimberly Smoak, who added that she took all responsibility for the delay.
She also told lawmakers that the surveys were a new frontier for AHCA and one that had the agency working with the federal Agency for Healthcare Research Quality (AHRQ), which conducts a similar, but voluntary, culture survey of hospital and ambulatory surgical centers (ASCs).
“I’m not making excuses, I’m just telling you honestly how it all came out,” Smoak told members of the House Select Committee on Health Innovation, which held its inaugural meeting Monday afternoon.
Smoak told the committee that hospitals and ambulatory surgical centers could begin surveying their staff members in 2023 and can survey through the end of 2024. Hospitals can begin reporting the survey information to the state beginning June 2025. The state’s 306 licensed hospitals and 479 licensed ASCs must report the survey information by August 2025.
Smoak estimated it would take the state between six to nine months to compile and analyze the data and make it publicly available.
At the behest of former House Speaker Chris Sprowls, the Legislature in 2020 passed HB 763. The bill required hospitals and ASCs to conduct patient safety culture surveys of facility staff who are allowed to anonymously respond. The law required facilities to use the AHRQ patient safety culture but directed AHCA to alter it to gauge the likelihood of staff to seek care for themselves or their family within the facility.
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