Better Together Inpatient Survey 2010
Provisional Results Q&A
What did the survey cover?
The inpatients patient experience survey asked questions about people's experiences of staying overnight in a Scottish hospital between October 2008 and the end of September 2009. It asked patients about their experiences of admission, the ward and environment, staff, medicines and discharge. A copy of the questionnaire is available on the Better Together website.
View the Provisional Results for individual hospitals and NHS Boards
What reports are being published?
Two types of report are being published on the 27 July 2010. Individual reports for hospitals in Scotland and reports for each NHS Board on their overall results.
Reports are available for 96 hospitals across Scotland. Other hospitals did take part in the survey but had too few responses (due to their size) to have individual reports. However, their results are included within the overall results for their NHS Board.
Also available are reports giving overall results for all 14 territorial health boards in Scotland, plus the National Waiting Times Centre Board (Golden Jubilee).
Why are these provisional results?
The Better Together Inpatient Survey results published today (27 July 2010) are currently only available for individual hospitals and health boards because additional analysis is needed to explore the results more fully and provide analysis of results nationally. This will include a summary of results for the whole of Scotland as well as relevant comparisons such as by type of hospital e.g. community hospitals. Once this analysis is completed a national report will be made available along with updated reports for individual hospitals and health boards on the 28 September 2010.
The publishing of provisional results at hospital level mirrors exactly the approach taken to the publication of the Better Together GP survey results published on the 27 April 2010. This provisional release has now been updated and a national report published alongside this update today (27 July 2010).
The reason for the publication of provisional results in advance of a national report is to allow NHS Boards and hospitals to start acting upon results as soon as possible. In addition it allows users including NHS Boards to comment on the format of the reports so that amendments can be made to them when the final results are released in September.
How are the results presented?
Each report gives results for each question in the survey except Q12 , Q25, Q27, Q31, Q32, Q34, and Q37. This is because the results for these questions need further analysis and will be provided in the national report. Each report is divided into different sections on: admission; hospital and environment; care and treatment; doctors; nurses and staff overall; leaving hospital; and overall results.
At the end of each report there are also sections giving the top five and bottom five results and results for information questions e.g. whether people shared a room or bay with members of the opposite sex.
Results for each question are shown as coloured bars. These show what percentage of responses were negative (red part of the bar on the left), neutral (yellow part of the bar) or positive (green part of the bar on the right) about each question. Also provided are the number of responses received and the percentage positive as a number.
NHS Boards will be able to view their own boards frequencies for these questions prior to the national report on a Better Together online reporting system. This system will not be available to the public.
What does the pink shading on the percentage positive scores for the hospital reports mean?
Where the percentage positive number is shaded pink on the hospital reports this indicates that the percentage positive score for this question is significantly less than the Scottish average. The national average used to make this calculation is a crude straight average of all the responses.
Crude national average table
In the national report which will be published at the end of September the results will be weighted to take into account the size of the hospitals to avoid smaller hospitals being over represented in the results.
Board level reports do not contain this shading.
What technique was used for the pink shading?
For each question three standard deviations away from the Scottish average was used as the control limits (a 99.7 % level of significance). Hospitals that fall out with these control limits have been highlighted pink in the site level reports. The greater the number of responses for a hospital, the tighter the control limits which explains why some of the question in the smaller hospital are not highlighted even if they have lower results.
This technique is used in other NHS projects such as surgical profiles
http://www.indicators.scot.nhs.uk/SUpdateP/Analysis.html