What are the HCAHPS survey questions?

What topics do the questions cover?

The survey’s 22 substantive questions are grouped into eleven publicly reported measures, each built from one to three questions on a topic:

• Communication with nurses — Courtesy and respect, listening carefully, explaining things understandably.
• Communication with doctors — The same three behaviors, asked about physicians.
• Responsiveness of hospital staff — Whether help came as soon as needed when the patient asked for it right away, and help getting to the bathroom or using a bedpan. (The old call-button question was retired in 2025.)
• Communication about medicines — Whether new medicines were explained: what they were for, possible side effects.
• Cleanliness of hospital environment — How often the room and bathroom were kept clean.
• Restfulness of hospital environment — Quiet at night, whether the patient could get the rest they needed, and whether staff helped them rest and recover. New in 2025; it absorbed the old quietness question.
• Care coordination — Whether doctors, nurses and other staff seemed informed and up-to-date about the patient's care, worked well together, and planned care after discharge with the patient and their family or caregiver. New in 2025.
• Discharge information — Whether staff talked about the help the patient would need after leaving, and gave written information about symptoms to look out for.
• Information about symptoms — Whether the family or caregiver got enough information about what symptoms or health problems to watch for after discharge. New in 2025.
• Global items — The overall 0–10 hospital rating and willingness to recommend.

Screening questions (did you get new medicines? did you need help?) route patients past items that don’t apply, and an “About You” section collects the characteristics CMS uses for patient-mix adjustment — plus, since 2025, whether the stay was planned in advance. Race and ethnicity are asked for congressionally mandated reporting and are not used to adjust scores.

How are the questions answered?

The core experience questions use a four-point frequency scale — Never, Sometimes, Usually, Always — because the survey measures whether good care happened reliably, not whether the patient was satisfied on average. Three of the questions added in 2025 answer No, Yes somewhat, or Yes definitely; the two discharge-information questions are Yes/No. In the headline “top-box” score only the most positive answer counts (how HCAHPS scoring works is its own guide). The overall rating runs 0–10, and the recommend question from “Definitely no” to “Definitely yes.”

What can hospitals change?

Nothing in the core — no rewording, no reordering, no cherry-picking. What hospitals can do is add up to 12 supplemental questions of their own, placed after the 32 core questions; CMS neither reviews them nor receives their data. Done well, supplemental items are how you get answers to your questions (the new wing, the discharge pharmacy program) while the core stays comparable. Done badly, they make the survey long enough that completion suffers — part of designing them is knowing when to stop.

Which version is current?

The current instrument took effect for discharges on or after January 1, 2025. It grew from 29 to 32 questions, added measures for care coordination, restfulness of the hospital environment and information about symptoms, retired the three Care Transition questions along with the call-button and emergency-room questions, and added three web-first survey modes. Results from the updated survey first appeared on Care Compare in October 2026. Searches for “HCAHPS survey questions 2025” are really asking “what changed?” — that is the answer. The safe habit: always work from the current official questionnaire and translations on HCAHPS Online (linked below), not from an old PDF in a shared drive. If your survey vendor is doing its job, the current instrument is its problem, not yours — that’s part of what a CMS-approved HCAHPS vendor is for.

Quick answers.