Health and Care Experience Survey 2021 to 2022: technical report

9. Compliance with the National Statistics Code of Practice

A National Statistics Publication for Scotland

The United Kingdom Statistics Authority has designated these statistics as National Statistics, in accordance with the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 and signifying compliance with the Code of Practice for Official Statistics.

Designation can be interpreted to mean that the statistics:

• meet identified user needs;
• are produced, managed and disseminated to high standards;
• and are explained well.

Once statistics have been designated as National Statistics it is a statutory requirement that the Code of Practice shall continue to be observed.

National Statistics status means that our statistics meet the highest standards of trustworthiness, quality and public value, and it is our responsibility to maintain compliance with these standards.

Changes to these statistics

Since the latest review by the Office for Statistics Regulation, we have continued to comply with the Code of Practice for Statistics, and have:

• Reviewed the survey questionnaire to ensure that the data collected continue to meet user needs;
• Removed survey questions that are not well used to reduce respondent burden;
• Added a new section to the survey on COVID to provide valuable contextual information on the patients experience during the pandemic;
• Begun taking steps towards making the survey analysis process a Reproducible Analytical Pipeline by analysing the data using R;
• Reviewed and updated the Privacy Notice to ensure that it is compliant with GDPR and good practice.

Respondent Burden

The UK Code of Practice for Official Statistics requires all producers of National and Official Statistics to report annually the estimated costs of responding to statistical surveys.

The respondent burden for the Health and Care Experience Survey is calculated in line with Government Statistical Service Guidance on Calculating Compliance Costs^[7]. The survey is a household survey of patients registered with a GP practice in Scotland, respondents are not contacted again to validate their survey responses and it is not expected that respondents would incur any external costs when completing the questionnaire. The respondent burden is therefore calculated on the basis of time taken.

The survey achieved a total of 130,352 completed return. The time for completion of the survey is estimated to range from 2 to 10 minutes, depending on which health and social care services the respondent has used and whether they have caring responsibilities. The median time for completion is taken to be 6 minutes. Calculating the burden as the total number of responses multiplied by the median time for completion gives a respondent burden of 782,112 minutes.