Scottish Inpatient Patient Experience Survey 2011 Volume 1: National Results

3 Results - admission to hospital

Admission to hospital

3.1 Patients were asked if their most recent hospital stay was an emergency or urgent, or waiting list or planned in advance.

3.2 Emergency or urgent patients were asked if they went to the Accident and Emergency department ( A&E) when they arrived at hospital.

3.3 Patients who had been to the A&E department were asked to rate the overall care and treatment they received during their time in A&E and how much they agreed or disagreed with the following two statements:

• In A&E I was told how long I would have to wait;
• In A&E I was told what was happening in a way I could understand.

3.4 Waiting list and planned in advance patients were asked the following two questions:

• How did you feel about the length of time you waited to be admitted to hospital after being referred?
• Did the information you were given before attending hospital help you understand what would happen?

3.5 All patients were asked:

• From the time you arrived at hospital, how did you feel about the time you had to wait to get to a bed on the ward?
• Overall how would you rate your admission to hospital?

Views on admission overall

3.6 Patients generally rated their admission to hospital positively, with 80 per cent describing it as either excellent or good compared to 81 per cent last year. Fourteen percent of patients rated their admission as fair and six per cent rated it as poor or very poor. Chart 1 shows how patients answered the question.

Chart 1 Overall how would you rate your admission to hospital

3.7 In terms of patients' route of admission into hospital, emergency or urgent patients were less likely to score their overall admission to hospital positively (76%). Patients who were admitted from a waiting list or planned in advance were more likely to report a positive overall experience of their admission to hospital (86%).

Views on individual aspects of admission

3.8 Table 1 shows patient responses to questions about admission to hospital. Annex B shows in which survey responses were classed as positive, neither positive nor negative or negative for each question.

3.9 The aspect of admission that patients were most positive about was the information that waiting list or planned in advance patients were given before attending hospital to help them to understand what would happen (96%). The aspect that patients were least positive about was being told how long that they would have to wait in A&E (49%).

3.10 The percentage of patients rating their admission positively was generally very similar to last year. However there was a five percentage point decrease in the percentage of patients who strongly agreed or agreed that they were told how long that they would have to wait in A&E. There was an NHS target ^[4] until 2008/09 that 98 per cent of patients should wait less than four hours in A&E. Although it is no longer a target it is still a standard that NHS Boards are expected to meet. We have found that, across hospitals, the percentage of patients waiting more than four hours in A&E^[5] and the percentage of patients not being told how long they will have to wait are positively correlated.

Table 1 Summary of the results to questions about patients' admission to hospital

* Not all rows add to 100% due to rounding, statistically significant differences are in bold

Waiting to be admitted after being referred

3.11 During the period covered by the survey, the target for the length of time no patient had to wait longer than from being placed on a waiting list to admission for an inpatient or day case treatment was lowered to 12 weeks ^[6]. Only a small percentage of patients who attended hospital during the period covered by the survey had to wait longer than 12 weeks ^[7], but 10 per cent of patients feel that the time they had to wait was too long. Only 1 per cent of patients feel that the time they had to wait was too short.