Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.The National Patient Survey Programme is one of the largest patient survey programmes in the world. It provides an opportunity to monitor experiences of health and provides data to assist with registration of trusts and monitoring on-going compliance. Understanding what people think about the care and treatment they receive is crucial to improving the quality of care being delivered by healthcare organisations. One way of doing this is by asking people who have recently used the health service to tell the Care Quality Commission (CQC) about their experiences. The CQC will use the results from the surveys in the regulation, monitoring and inspection of NHS acute trusts (or, for community mental health service user surveys, providers of mental health services) in England. Data are used in CQC Insight, an intelligence tool which identifies potential changes in quality of care and then supports deciding on the right regulatory response. Survey data will also be used to support CQC inspections. Each survey has a different focus. These include patients' experiences in outpatient and accident and emergency departments in Acute Trusts, and the experiences of people using mental health services in the community. History of the programme The National Patient Survey Programme began in 2002, and was then conducted by the Commission for Health Improvement (CHI), along with the Commission for Healthcare Audit and Inspection (CHAI). Administration of the programme was taken over by the Healthcare Commission in time for the 2004 series. On 1 April 2009, the CQC was formed, which replaced the Healthcare Commission. Further information about the National Patient Survey Programme may be found on the CQC Patient Survey Programme web pages.
Mental Health Trusts: Community Mental Health Service User Survey, 2011 was designed to provide actionable feedback to each participating trust on patients’ views of the care they had received in England, as well as providing CQC with data to assist with registration of trusts and monitoring on-going compliance. Whilst surveys of community mental health services were also carried out 2004-2008, the data from the 2011 survey is not comparable to those due to changes to the questionnaire and the sampling strategy. A survey of Community Mental Health Services was also carried out in 2010 (SN 6591), but substantive changes were again made to a number of questions and/or response categories in the 2011 survey questionnaire, so it is again not directly comparable to the 2010 data. Further details can be found in the national briefing note included with the supporting documentation. For the second edition (May 2012), an updated version of the data file was deposited, with amended value labels included for the variable age_group.
Main Topics:
The survey covered issues that affect the quality of care that service users receive and were identified by service users as important to them. Topics include: relationships with healthcare professionals, medication, care and treatment, care plan, care review, day to day living, and crisis care.
Simple random sample
Staff at each NHS trust identified the service users who were eligible for inclusion and drew a random sample of 850 service users (aged 16 years and over), following a standard procedure set out in the survey guidance issued to trusts. The sampled service users were sent a questionnaire with a covering letter. Service users who did not respond were sent up to two reminders.
Postal survey
