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.
The Community Mental Health Service User Survey, 2013 was designed to provide actionable feedback to each participating trust on service users' views of the care they had received. Comparability with previous Community Mental Health Service surveys: Previous Community Mental Health Service surveys were conducted in 2004-2005 (held at the Archive under SN 5165), 2006 (SN 5598), 2007 (SN 5829), 2008 (SN 6062), 2010 (SN 6591), 2011 (SN 6868) and 2012 (SN 7141). Data from the 2004-2008 surveys are not comparable with the 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013 surveys due to changes to the questionnaire and the sampling strategy. Users should also note that changes to the question and/or response categories between survey years may affect comparability between the 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013 surveys. Also, the 2012 and 2013 surveys included patients aged 18 years and over, whereas previous surveys included those aged 16 years and over. This change has been made because Section 251 approval from the Ethics and Confidentiality Committee (ECC) was not granted for those aged 16-17 years from 2012.
Main Topics:
The survey covered issues that affect the quality of care that service users receive and were identified as important to them. Topics included: health and social care workers, medications, talking therapies, care co-ordinators, care plans, care reviews, crisis care and day-to-day living. Data from questions 53, 54 and 55 have all been removed due to very low numbers at trust level for many sub groups.
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, 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. Each trust was responsible for ensuring that their survey was carried out following the standard sampling and survey procedures, as set out in the guidance issued to trusts.
Postal survey
