Maternity — patient experience (CQC National Maternity Survey)
Published by Care Quality Commission · Official source
Update schedule
- Annual — fielded April to July, results published around December.
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 maternity journey — antenatal care, labour and birth, care in hospital after the birth, and postnatal care at home — each shown as a score out of 10 and a banding against other trusts
Caveats
- Every score is a RELATIVE comparison against other trusts, calculated with a significance test, NOT an absolute measure of quality. CQC's own guidance is explicit that 'all of the comparisons made... are relative: we have compared trusts against each other, not against absolute performance thresholds' — a trust rated 'about the same' or 'better' can still be performing poorly against a fixed standard, and vice versa.
- We collapse CQC's 7-category banding (much worse / worse / somewhat worse / about the same / somewhat better / better / much better) into 3 plain-English groups for display: worse, about the same, or better than most other trusts.
- This is a voluntary, self-selected survey — service users who had a live birth in February (sometimes January) of the survey year were sampled, and only some responded. 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 ~58 scored questions in the source survey, chosen to span the maternity journey, not every question CQC publishes.
- Reported per trust — the same figures apply to every hospital the trust runs, always labelled 'Trust-wide'.
- 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.