HospitalCheck

Patient experience — inpatient care (CQC Adult Inpatient Survey)

Published by Care Quality Commission · Official source

Update schedule

  • Annual — fielded in the survey year, results published the following autumn/winter.

Level of detail

  • NHS trust

What we show

  • Response rate and number of respondents to the survey at the trust
  • A curated set of headline questions spanning the inpatient stay — admission, the ward, doctors, nurses, care & treatment, and leaving hospital — each shown as a score out of 10 alongside the national average

Caveats

  • "Better" or "worse" is a STATISTICAL SIGNIFICANCE call, not a raw comparison of means. CQC's workbook publishes, for every trust and question, the RANGE of scores expected for a trust of that size (control limits centred on the national average, wider for trusts with fewer respondents). We call a trust 'better' only when its own mean score sits above the top of that 95% expected range, and 'worse' only when it sits below the bottom. A trust that scores above the national average on paper can still show as 'about the same' if it stays inside the expected range — that's deliberate, not a rounding quirk.
  • This is a voluntary, self-selected survey of people who were recently inpatients — a lower score is a prompt to look closer, not proof of poor care.
  • CQC suppresses a question's result for a trust when fewer than 30 respondents there answered it; we only show a question where CQC published a value, and never infer or estimate a missing one.
  • We show a curated subset of the survey's scored questions, chosen to span the whole inpatient stay, not every question CQC publishes.
  • Reported per trust — the same figures apply to every hospital the trust runs, always labelled 'Trust-wide'.
  • England only. There is no NHS 'pass mark' for this data. It never appears in BadgePanel, a ranking, or a league table anywhere on the site.

Reused under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Contains public sector information.