CQC: Adult inpatient survey 2024 (9 September 2025)

Summary

This Care Quality Commission (CQC) survey looks at the experiences of people who stayed at least one night in hospital as an inpatient.

People were eligible to take part in the survey if they stayed in hospital for at least one night during November 2024 and were aged 16 years or over at the time of their stay.

Content

Positive findings

Interactions with hospital staff

• 82.2% of respondents felt they were ‘always’ treated with respect and dignity while in hospital and 79.9% of respondents felt they were 'always' treated with kindness and compassion.
• Most respondents felt they were able to talk to hospital staff about their worries and fears to some extent (60.4% ‘always’ and 30% ‘sometimes’).
• 76.2% of respondents ‘always’ felt included in conversations about their care by both doctors, while 76.8% ‘always’ felt included by nurses.
• A majority of respondents felt staff involved them in decisions about their care and treatment to some extent (43.8% were involved ‘a fair amount, 36.8% ‘a great deal’).
• Confidence and trust in hospital staff remains high, with 80.1% and 78.3% saying they ‘always’ had confidence and trust in doctors and nurses respectively (compared to 80.2% and 77.8% in 2022, respectively).

Staff availability

• 57.9% felt there were ‘always’ enough nurses on duty to care for them, compared to 55.7% in 2023 and having previously fallen to 51.6% in 2022.
• Most respondents felt they were able to get a member of staff to help them when they needed attention to some extent (64.5% ‘always’ and 33.1% ‘sometimes’).

Overall experience

• 52.1% of respondents rated their overall experience of inpatient care as a 9 or 10 (where 10 is a very good experience) compared with 50.8% in 2023. Those who gave scores of 0 or 1, indicating they had a very poor experience, remains low at 3.4%.

Key areas for improvement

Waiting times

• 22.2% of elective patients said they would like to have been admitted ‘a bit sooner’, while 19.9% said ‘a lot sooner’.
• 25.2% of elective patients said their health got ‘a bit worse’ while waiting to be admitted to hospital, while a further 17.7% said it got ‘much worse’.
• 17.8% of respondents felt they waited ‘far too long’ to get a bed after arriving at hospital, unchanged compared to 2023 (17.8%).
• 25.5% of patients who had to wait to be admitted onto a ward did so from between 6 to 12 hours, with a further 17.5% waiting from 12 to 24 hours, and 9.8% waiting more than 24 hours.

Care after leaving hospital

• 19.9% of respondents said that hospital staff did not discuss whether they would need any additional equipment or changes to their home after leaving the hospital but would have liked them to. Analysis also indicates a downward trend in most positive response option for this question since 2020.
• Less than a half (47.5%) of respondents felt they ‘definitely’ got enough support from health or social care services to help them manage their condition after leaving hospital, and 23.1% said they did not receive enough support.