30 healthcare employee satisfaction survey questions by department

Every healthcare organization runs on more than one job.

A nurse's workday, a physician's workday, a lab tech's workday, and an environmental services worker's workday barely resemble each other, even though they all happen under the same roof.

A single, generic staff satisfaction survey flattens those differences into one score that does not tell any one leader what to do next.

This question bank is organized by department instead, so nursing, physician, allied health, and support leadership can each see what their own people are saying. It's a set of question examples to adapt, not a validated instrument, and it's meant to run alongside, not instead of, your engagement work.

Each department below gets its own short set of questions. Use the whole bank for an all-staff rollout with department-specific branching, or pull just one section for a single department. Most items work well as a Likert agreement or satisfaction scale (four to five response points, labeled in words rather than numbers); a couple are better as a direct satisfaction rating.

Nursing satisfaction tends to track staffing, scheduling, and whether concerns raised at the bedside actually go somewhere. Consider these questions:

Physician satisfaction often comes down to time, autonomy, and whether leadership asks before it acts. Consider these questions:

Therapy, lab, imaging, pharmacy, and similar roles often feel left out of staff surveys built around bedside or physician work. Consider these questions:

Environmental services, food service, registration, scheduling, facilities, and billing teams keep a hospital running, but they rarely see a question written for them. Consider these questions:

Close any department section with one shared, optional open-ended question: "What is one change that would make the biggest difference in your day-to-day work?" Keep it to this single item; open-ended questions take real effort to answer and to read, so one well-placed question beats several shallow ones.

Each department's questions map to a different decision. The table below groups the categories by what they reveal and who typically acts on them.

Read department results side by side rather than as one blended score. A hospital-wide average can hide a department that is struggling behind one that is thriving, and it gives nursing leadership, physician leadership, and support leadership the same generic summary instead of the specific one each of them needs.

Ask for department or unit early, since routing and reporting depend on it. Keep identifying questions to a minimum: department and shift are usually enough, since more specific identifiers can make small teams feel exposed.

Order the body of the survey from concrete to sensitive. Start with staffing, workload, and equipment since these are easy to answer and build momentum, then move to scheduling and teamwork. Save supervisor trust and safety and voice questions for later, once staff have warmed up and are more likely to answer honestly.

Avoid putting every department's rating items into one large grid. A big matrix asking staff to rate many unrelated things on the same scale tends to invite rushed, same-answer responses. Separate, clearly worded multiple-choice questions for each construct, even using the same underlying scale, produce more reliable answers than one dense matrix.

Set and share a minimum reporting group size, such as not reporting results for any group smaller than a handful of respondents, before launch. Anonymous mode hides who gave which answer, but it cannot protect someone's identity in a department of two or three people if results are still broken out by that tiny group. Do not promise anonymity based on the survey setting alone; promise it based on the setting and the reporting rules you commit to following.

Pick the department sections that matter most right now, adapt the wording to your organization, and build the survey with branching so nursing, physicians, allied health, and support staff each see the right questions. SurveyMonkey gives HR and department leaders a place to build that survey, route it by department, and keep results separated instead of blended into one score.

If engagement, not just satisfaction, is the bigger priority for your organization this cycle, start with the healthcare employee engagement survey guide instead, then come back to this question bank to go department by department on satisfaction.