The municipality of Val de Bagnes wishes to optimise its medical and therapeutic services to meet the needs of its resident and seasonal population.

The questionnaire covers several key areas, including access to care, barriers to access, and the desired diversity of healthcare providers. The data collected will inform a municipal strategy aimed at improving local and regional healthcare provision.

The survey is funded by the municipality of Val de Bagnes and conducted in collaboration with the Valais School of Health Sciences (HES-SO) and the Swiss Centre of Expertise in the Social Sciences (FORS).

It is not possible to survey all individuals who reside year-round in the municipality or who own a second home there. You have therefore been selected at random. This random selection ensures that the sample is representative and reflects the diversity of the municipal population. You are an irreplaceable representative of people who share your characteristics, such as your age group or level of education.

The individuals invited to participate were randomly selected from the municipal population register (for residents) and from the Tourism Office register (for secondary residence).

By taking part in this survey, you contribute to building an accurate picture of healthcare service needs among both permanent and seasonal residents, as well as any barriers to accessing care. This information is essential for developing proposals to improve municipal medical and therapeutic services.

The responses collected will only be representative of the population of Val de Bagnes if as many selected individuals as possible take part. Whatever your nationality, age, level of education or employment situation, your opinion matters. In doing so, you contribute to improving the municipality’s healthcare system.

Data protection is an absolute priority. FORS, which is conducting the survey, takes the necessary security measures to ensure compliance with applicable data protection regulations during the collection, storage and processing of data. All individuals and institutions involved in carrying out the survey are required to act in accordance with the Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection (FADP).

Your information is treated confidentially. Your responses are never linked to your personal contact details, making it impossible to identify you. Your responses are stored in a pseudonymised dataset. Those working on the survey have access only to data without name, address, postcode or date of birth. Analyses carried out using this data are statistical in nature and concern all respondents as a whole, for example: “28% of the population of Val de Bagnes report being satisfied with access to healthcare in the municipality.”

You will find more detailed information on data protection below.

Once the survey is completed, the pseudonymisation keys are deleted and the fully anonymised data are made available to other researchers as open research data. At this stage, it is no longer possible to identify participants. Open research data refers to the practice of making research data freely accessible and transparent.

The survey results will be published in aggregated form — meaning that individuals cannot be identified — on the website of the municipality of Val de Bagnes (www.valdebagnes.ch) and on ArODES, the open archive of the HES-SO domains (https://arodes.hes-so.ch).

If you have any questions, you may contact the Valais School of Health Sciences from Monday to Friday, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., on +41 58 606 84 50 or +41 58 606 84 89. You may also send your question by email to: erwan.monnay@hevs.ch.

Responsible institutions

The survey on healthcare service needs in the municipality of Val de Bagnes is funded by the municipality and conducted in collaboration with the Valais School of Health Sciences and the Swiss Centre of Expertise in the Social Sciences (FORS). All individuals and institutions involved are required to comply with the Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection (FADP).

Your name was randomly selected from the population register of the municipality of Val de Bagnes and from the Tourism Office register.

Your participation in the survey on healthcare service needs in the municipality of Val de Bagnes

You have been selected at random. Your participation is important in order to properly reflect the diversity of the population. The questionnaire includes questions about your general health status and your experiences regarding healthcare received in the municipality.

Participation is voluntary. You may decline to answer specific questions. You may withdraw from the survey at any time, without giving a reason and without any disadvantage to you.

What happens to your data?

• We use your contact details (name and address) exclusively to communicate with you. Only the municipal administration of Val de Bagnes and the printing company have access to this information. The Valais School of Health Sciences and FORS do not have access to these details.

• Your survey data are recorded electronically without name or address. Your identity is replaced with an encrypted code (pseudonymisation). Your name and address are always stored separately from the questionnaire data.

• The data are collected using the online software Qualtrics, developed by Qualtrics LLC, based in the United States, and used to create surveys and questionnaires. The collection of metadata is limited to what is strictly necessary (for example, IP addresses and location data are not recorded). Data are encrypted at every stage and stored on Qualtrics servers in Germany for the duration of data collection. All data management within Qualtrics complies with the standards of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which is stricter than Swiss data protection law.

• Once the survey has ended, the data are processed in such a way as to exclude, as far as possible, any inference about the identity of respondents (for example, by deleting or replacing certain directly or indirectly identifying information). Only then are all collected data analysed.

• After an initial analysis by the responsible researchers, the pseudonymisation keys are deleted and the fully anonymised and cleaned dataset is made available as open research data on the Zenodo platform, hosted by CERN. This is done in compliance with applicable data protection legislation. From that point onwards, the entire dataset is made available to the scientific community (researchers, lecturers and students) worldwide, upon request, for research and teaching purposes. Anyone wishing to use the data must request permission from the responsible researchers and is informed of their legal obligation to respect the confidentiality of personal data and required to sign a data protection agreement. Commercial use of the data is prohibited.

• Once the survey has ended, and no later than 11 May, the separately stored contact details will be permanently deleted.

• In all scientific or public publications, results are presented only for groups (for example, men, women). Information relating to individual persons is not identifiable.

In all cases, the following rule applies:

As long as you can be identified in our data by means of the pseudonymised code or your contact details, you have the right to access your personal data, as well as the right to rectification and deletion. You may also object to the processing of your personal data or request restriction of processing.

Once your contact details have been deleted, identification is no longer possible due to pseudonymisation. The above rights can then no longer be exercised.

Contact and complaints procedure

If you have any questions regarding the survey, please contact the Valais School of Health Sciences on +41 58 606 84 50 or +41 58 606 84 89, or by email at erwan.monnay@hevs.ch.

Any breach of data protection law may be reported to the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC): https://www.edoeb.admin.ch.