Inpatient services

Our national surveys of the views of adult inpatients ask about the experiences of people who have been admitted to hospital overnight or for longer. The questions in the survey cover the issues that patients consider important in their care and what we'd like to be included in national assessments. The survey offers an insight into their experiences and we use this information in the assessment of NHS trusts.

Survey of adult inpatients 2008

Over 72,000 adult patients from 165 acute and specialist NHS trusts in England responded to the 2008 inpatient survey between October 2008 and January 2009, a response rate of 54%.

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 each trust in its assessment of NHS performance.

Results for England

Key findings

The 2008 survey results overall show significant improvement in the experience of patients on key areas relating to infection control.

But the survey highlights persistent problems in important aspects of care. Despite some improvements, the NHS must do more to ensure hospital food is consistently of good quality and that patients are sent copies of letters between hospitals and GPs.

Performance remained poor in other key areas such as help with eating, mixed-sex accommodation, involvement in decisions about care and answering call buttons.

In 2008, 95% of patients described their room or ward as "very clean" or "fairly clean", up from 93% in 2002. There has been an improvement in the percentage of patients describing their room or ward as "very clean", up from 56% in 2002 and 53% in 2007, to 60% in 2008
Ninety-one per cent of patients said their toilets and bathrooms were "very clean" (52%) or "fairly clean" (39%), up from 88% in 2002.
Of those patients who said they needed it (30%), 18% said they did not get enough help from staff to eat their meals. This is an improvement since 2007 when 20% said they did not get enough help, but no change from 2002 (18%).
Fifty-two per cent of patients said they were "definitely" involved as much as they wanted in decisions about their care, up from 51% in 2007 but down from 53% in 2005. One in ten patients still say that they were not involved as much as they wanted to be, the same as in 2005.

Find out more about the results for England in our highlighting key issues.

Briefing highlighting national trends and significant findings from the survey (PDF, 59KB, opens in new window)

Full 2008 results with historical comparisons

Tables showing the national percentage results from the 2008 survey compared with previous years (where questions have been asked previously) are also available in the document:

National results for each question, with comparisons to previous years (PDF, 201KB, opens in new window)

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'.

Find out how your local hospital trust scored

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.