The National Adult Inpatient Survey conducted in the English National Health Service from 2002 to 2009: how have the data been used and what do we know as a result?

Summary

When it was initiated in 2001, England's national patient survey programme was one of the first in the world and has now been widely emulated in other healthcare systems. The aim of the survey programme was to make the National Health Service (NHS) more 'patient centred' and more responsive to patient feedback. The national inpatient survey has now been running in England annually since 2002 gathering data from over 600,000 patients. The aim of this study is to investigate how the data have been used and to summarise what has been learned about patients' evaluation of care as a result.