Changes to the NHS Patient Survey Programme following consultation

9 Nov 2016 07:17 PM

Following your feedback earlier this year, we will be improving how we manage the NHS Patient Survey Programme.

These changes include extending the scope and frequency of our A&E survey, continuing our survey on children and young people, and piloting a new survey on people's experiences of NHS healthcare in the community.

The programme is made up of a series of surveys, which allow people who have received NHS-funded care to share their experiences. These are then collated and reported on at provider and national levels so that the system can learn from the findings.

In May, we launched our consultation, which proposed a number of changes to the frequency and format of some of these surveys in order to enhance the value of the information they provide and ensure that they remain relevant and useful.

In response to our consultation, we will be introducing changes to the programme from April 2017, including:

• We will further investigate incorporating questions on people’s outpatient experiences into the inpatient survey.
• The A&E survey will be extended to include all relevant urgent care services such as urgent care centres and not just A&E departments.
• Following its pilot in 2015, the children and young people's survey will now be carried out every two years.
• We will pilot a brand new survey for community health services to help address the current gap in information about people's experiences of care in the community.
• We will increase the frequency of the A&E and maternity surveys so that they run at least every two years, instead of every three years.
• We will explore how we can give providers early access to their survey results in advance of the publication of the national findings to allow them to develop their action plans sooner.
• We will trial how to improve response rates from NHS trusts across all of our surveys and we will provide more analysis in our national reports about the experience of different patient subgroups.

The survey programme is used to collect feedback on the experiences of people using a range of NHS healthcare services across the country and the results contribute to our assessment of NHS performance as well as ongoing monitoring and inspections.

The programme provides valuable feedback for NHS trusts, which they are expected to use to improve patient experience.

We received over 200 responses during our consultation from providers, commissioners, patient groups, system partners and members of the public.

Further information is available here.

Later this month, we will publish the latest results of our annual community mental health survey. The results will be published here along with last year's findings.

Find out more