Inpatient services survey 2009

Our national surveys of the views of adult inpatients ask about the experiences of people who have been admitted to hospital and had at least one overnight stay. The questions in the survey cover the issues that patients consider important in their care. The survey offers an insight into their experiences and we use this information in the assessment of NHS trusts.


Survey of adult inpatients 2009

More than 69,000 adult patients from 162 acute and specialist NHS trusts in England responded to the 2009 inpatient survey between September 2009 and January 2010, a response rate of 52%.

The results from the survey are used by NHS trusts to understand the experiences of their patients and help improve their performance. The Care Quality Commission will also use the results from the survey in a range of ways, including use of the results from each trust in its assessment of NHS performance as well as in regulatory activities such as registration, monitoring ongoing compliance, and reviews.

Results for England

Key findings

The 2009 survey points to big improvements in cleanliness and a decline in mixed sex accommodation with greater proportions of patients saying that:

  • They never shared a sleeping area in hospital (for example a room or bay) with a member of the opposite sex.
  • They did not use the same bathroom or shower area as a member of the opposite sex.
  • Wards, toilets and bathrooms were “very clean”.

But persistent problems remain in other areas including a lack of information around medicines:

  • Almost a tenth said that they were not told about the purpose of medication they were to take home in a way they could understand.
  • Just under half said that they were not told about medication side-effects.

Full 2009 results with historical comparisons

Tables showing the national percentage results from the 2009 survey compared with previous years (where questions have been asked previously) are available below.

Results for NHS trusts

The survey results are shown for each NHS trust that took part in the survey under the ‘Find care services' section of our website. This shows a broad overview of how well a trust is doing, with more technical details available alongside the summary.

To access survey results for an NHS trust, enter a postcode or organisation name, select a trust, and scroll down to ‘What patients said about this trust'.

Feedback reports for NHS trusts

We provided each trust with a summary report on its scores in the survey, so that the trust can benchmark its performance against that of other trusts and identify any areas for improvement. To ensure fairer comparisons across the results from all trusts, survey data are standardised by age, gender and admission method (emergency or elective). We do this because we know that the views of a respondent can reflect not only their experience of NHS services, but can also relate to certain demographic characteristics, such as their age and sex. Further information is provided in each report.

Questionnaire 

This shows the scoring assigned to each question as used in the trust level results.