Scottish Inpatient Patient Experience Survey 2012 Volume 2: Technical Report

1 Introduction

Introduction

1.1 The Better Together Scottish Patient Experience Inpatient Survey is a postal survey, first conducted in early 2010, with the aim of establishing the experience of a sample of people aged 16 years and over who had a recent overnight hospital stay. The survey covers six specific areas of inpatient experience: admission to hospital; the hospital and ward; care and treatment; hospital staff; arrangements for leaving hospital; and care and support services after leaving hospital. A copy of the questionnaire can be found in Appendix A.

1.2 The inpatient survey is administered across all 14 territorial NHS Boards, and the National Waiting Time Centre (NWTC) and provides results for 68 individual hospitals as well nationally for Scotland.

1.3 The third Scottish Patient Experience inpatient survey was run in 2012. This report provides technical information on the survey design, sampling, fieldwork and analysis of the 2012 inpatient survey. The latest results are available in the national report at: http://www.scotland.gov.uk/inpatientsurveynationalreport

Better Together: Scottish Patient Experience Programme

1.4 Better Together is Scotland's Patient Experience Programme, which supports NHS Scotland in developing ways to use patients' experiences to inform service design and planning across the health service to drive improvement.

1.5 The Better Together programme supports the Healthcare Quality Strategy for NHSScotland (or Quality Strategy) by providing a basis for the measurement of quality as experienced by service users across Scotland, in addition to support for local improvement.

1.6 The ultimate aim of the Quality Strategy is to deliver the highest quality health and care services to people in Scotland, and through this to ensure that NHSScotland is recognised by the people of Scotland as amongst the best in the world. Through the Better Together programme, people in Scotland are being given the opportunity to comment systematically on their experience of healthcare and its impact on their quality of life. The Scottish Inpatient Patient Experience Survey is one example of this work. The Scottish GP / local NHS services survey also allows patients to comment on community services. Further information on the GP / local NHS services survey can be found at: http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Statistics/Browse/Health/GPPatientExperienceSurvey.

1.7 Further information about the Quality Strategy can be found at: http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Health/NHS-Scotland/NHSQuality.

1.8 The Better Together Inpatient Experience Survey is jointly supported by Scottish Government, Information Services Division (ISD)^[1], NHS Boards and Healthcare Improvement Scotland^[2].

1.9 Further information about the Better Together programme can be found at: http://www.bettertogetherscotland.com.

Aims of the Better Together Inpatient Survey

1.10 The survey's specific aims are to:

• Gain a fuller understanding of the experiences of adult patients receiving inpatient services at NHS hospitals in Scotland;
• Provide NHS Boards and NHS hospitals with feedback on the experiences of their patients, relative to previous surveys and other areas in Scotland;
• Provide comparable national data on the quality of the patient experience across NHSScotland;
• Provide information for the national performance framework indicator 'Improve the quality of the healthcare experience in Scotland';
• Explore the variations in the experiences of different groups of patients.

Outputs from this survey

1.11 The national report is available at: http://www.scotland.gov.uk/inpatientsurveynationalreport

1.12 Reports for NHS Boards and individual hospitals are available at: http://www.patientexperience-bettertogether.scot.nhs.uk/index.html

1.13 These statistics have been independently assessed by the UK Statistics Authority and are designated as National Statistics subject to meeting the requirements set out in the assessment report: http://www.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/assessment/assessment/assessment-reports/assessment-report-131---statistics-on-scottish-patient-experience.pdf

1.14 The next section discusses the outputs from the survey in more detail.