Inpatient Experience Survey 2018: national results

3. Demographic & Health Information from Survey Respondents

We asked respondents a number of questions about themselves, and derived the age group of respondents from their CHI number ^[2] . This chapter provides a summary of this demographic information. Unlike the rest of the survey results in this report, this analysis is based on unweighted data.

Age and Gender

Women were slightly over represented in the survey compared to the total eligible inpatient population for the survey period. Overall, 54 per cent of the eligible inpatient population aged 16 and over were female, however 56 per cent of respondents to the survey described themselves as female.

Similarly, older people are over represented in the survey. Sixty two per cent of respondents were aged 65 or more, compared with 47 per cent of the adult eligible inpatient population as a whole.

The new weighting methodology ^[3] introduced in this survey attempts to adjust for these differences between the survey and population demographics.

Health Information

Respondents were asked to rate their health in general. Fifty per cent rated their health as excellent or good, 35 per cent rated it as fair and 15 per cent rated it as poor or very poor.

Around two thirds of respondents said that they had one or more long-term health conditions. The most commonly reported conditions were physical disability (reported by 23 per cent of respondents), chronic pain lasting at least 3 months (reported by 22 per cent of respondents) and deafness or a severe hearing impairment (reported by 19 per cent of respondents).