The NACCS has subscribed to an online audit facility called ‘Survey Galaxy’.
The aim of this new initiative is to maintain the quality of audits and surveys carried out by NACCS members.
In September 2016, due to consistently poor response rates of less than 30%, NACCS council decided to only support surveys that were answerable by Linkmen on behalf of their department. We will not be supporting surveys to all members in the near future. This decision will be reviewed on a regular basis.
We are now a ‘paperless’ society so members can be best surveyed via the web or email.
If you have a survey you wish to carry out, here is a quick guide as to what to do next…
- Look at the list of published surveys on the next page to make sure you are not repeating a recently surveyed topic.
-
If you are a trainee, you must have the involvement of a Consultant Neuroanaesthetist who is a member of the NACCS.
- Decide upon content (main clear questions you would like answering)
- Go to the ‘Survey Galaxy’ website and look at the tutorial film. (tutorial). After seeing this film you will see how to write the questions in a manner that is easy to upload to the site.
-
Create a questionnaire ‘offline’. (e.g. in MS Word)
-
Let some other local anaesthetists look at the survey to see if they have any helpful suggestions for improvement.
-
Send the completed document by emailing
surveys and uploading/attaching it to the email. Please make sure you include your name, place of work and grade.
-
You should include an introductory paragraph that will appear in the covering email. It will be assumed that the intention is to present the results of your survey at the next NACCS Annual Scientific Meeting and this will be stated in the introduction to the survey.
-
Make sure your survey is for ‘linkmen only’. Please indicate if this is for neuroanaesthesia or NeuroICU linkmen or both.
-
The survey will then be peer reviewed by a ‘panel’ of up to 3 consultant members of the NACCS. These reviewers may make suggestions for changes to the survey/questionnaire. We also have access to a medical statistician who may be asked to comment of the survey. Too many free text options makes answers very difficult to interpret in a meaningful way. Therefore please also be aware that not all survey proposals sent to NACCS are considered suitable for completion. Less than 50% of survey proposals end up progressing to distribution.This is done to maintain the quality of surveys being sent to NACCS linkmen and to minimise repetition of subject areas.
-
Make any changes necessary and send it back. It will then be uploaded onto the Survey Galaxy website.
-
After the document / questionnaire has been uploaded to the site, it will be previewed and any final changes made.
-
The invitation to participate in the survey will then be sent out as a ‘url’ address in an email to members, via the NACCS secretarial support team at the AAGBI.
NB: To avoid overloading linkmen’s email inboxes we will only allow one survey to be carried out at a time (maximum 1 survey per month)
It takes up to 3 months for a survey to go ‘live’ from its initial conception, so please make sure you allow time for this when planning – in practice, the final date for submissions to the ASM is usually the beginning of February.
It is also the intention that all completed surveys will be published on the website with all survey details, including raw results, accessible to all NACCS members. Publication will usually take place some 6 months after the survey has finished.
Thea de Beer
