Patient experience — A&E (CQC Urgent & Emergency Care 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 an A&E attendance — being told and kept updated on waiting times, doctors and nurses listening and being trusted, involvement in decisions about care, results and aftercare information, safety and dignity — each shown as a score out of 10 alongside the national average
Caveats
- We use the Type 1 (major, consultant-led A&E department) results only — CQC also publishes a Type 3 workbook for urgent treatment centres, which we do not show.
- "Better" or "worse" is a STATISTICAL SIGNIFICANCE call, not a raw comparison of means — the same expected-range test used for the Adult Inpatient Survey (see that page for the derivation). A trust that scores above the national average on paper can still show as 'about the same' if it stays inside the 95% expected range.
- This is a voluntary, self-selected survey of people who recently attended A&E — 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, not every question CQC publishes.
- Reported per trust — the same figures apply to every hospital the trust runs, always labelled 'Trust-wide'. Not every trust runs a major A&E department, so this section does not appear on every trust or hospital page.
- 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.