摘要

Objective To examine trends in patient experience and consistency between hospital trusts and settings. Methods Observational study of publicly available patient experience surveys of three hospital settings (inpatients (IP), accident and emergency (A&E) and outpatients (OP)) of 130 acute NHS hospital trusts in England between 2004/05 and 2014/15. Results Overall patient experience has been good, showing modest improvements over time across the three hospital settings. Individual questions with the biggest improvement across all three settings are cleanliness (IP: +7.1, A& E: +6.5, OP: +4.7) and information about danger signals (IP: +3.8, A&E: +3.9, OP: +4.0). Trust performance has been consistent over time: 71.5% of trusts ranked in the same cluster for more than five years. There is some consistency across settings, especially between outpatients and inpatients. The lowest-scoring questions, regarding information at discharge, are the same in all years and all settings. Conclusions The greatest improvement across all three settings has been for cleanliness, which has seen national policies and targets. Information about danger signals and medication sideeffects showed least consistency across settings and scores have remained low over time, despite information about danger signals showing a big increase in score. Patient experience of aspects of access and waiting have declined, as has experience of discharge delay, likely reflecting known increases in pressure on England's NHS.

  • 出版日期2017-10-26