I spoke to a research nurse once who told me you can't rely on patient satisfaction surveys to give you good information on whether a service is really good/useful or not as patients will normally say they were happy with it (I think based on personal interactions with the staff, and it doesn't mean the treatment is good). It has made me suspicious ever since of patient satisfaction surveys and the like, (though I remember one local patient group in the UK did a survey of people on their mailing list who had attended the local ME Clinic and the results were terrible for the clinic.).
Soon after that I happened to be sent a survey to fill out regarding my experience of a small procedure at a local hospital. I had been on a waiting list at a local public hospital for a small procedure, and once you are on a waiting list for a public hospital long enough you often get referred on to get the procedure done at a private hospital. I don't agree with this system, as it is basically a way of shifting public cash from the public hospital system to the private hospital system. It would be one thing if this was only done in emergencies and the like, but now the healthcare system relies on this method of sending public patients to private clinics.
I didn't fill out the survey (they sent it to me a few times) as though I was happy with the particular doctor and treatment , I was not happy with the initial long waiting-list and the privatisation of the public service, but there was no way of noting this in the survey. I think the survey was very general, and annonymised, and I don't think it would have been linked back to the doctor I saw, so it would have done him no good for patients to send in a good rating anyway (as far as I can remember it was a very generalised thing, probably sent out nationally). I knew there was a good chance the survey was deliberately designed to garnish a good result, so that the government could say that people were happy with the service, but it wouldn't mean that people were happy with this system overall.