Ambulance Service Survey, 2004

<p>The National Patient Survey Programme is one of the largest patient survey programmes in the world. It provides an opportunity to monitor experiences of health and provides data to assist with registration of trusts and monitoring on-going compliance. Understanding what people think about the care and treatment they receive is crucial to improving the quality of care being delivered by healthcare organisations. One way of doing this is by asking people who have recently used the health service to tell the Care Quality Commission (CQC) about their experiences.<br>
<br>The CQC will use the results from the surveys in the regulation, monitoring and inspection of NHS acute trusts (or, for community mental health service user surveys, providers of mental health services) in England. Data are used in CQC Insight, an intelligence tool which identifies potential changes in quality of care and then supports deciding on the right regulatory response. Survey data will also be used to support CQC inspections.<br>
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Each survey has a different focus. These include patients' experiences in outpatient and accident and emergency departments in Acute Trusts, and the experiences of people using mental health services in the community.<br>
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<i>History of the programme<br></i><br>
The National Patient Survey Programme began in 2002, and was then conducted by the Commission for Health Improvement (CHI), along with the Commission for Healthcare Audit and Inspection (CHAI). Administration of the programme was taken over by the Healthcare Commission in time for the 2004 series. On 1 April 2009, the CQC was formed, which replaced the Healthcare Commission.<br>
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Further information about the National Patient Survey Programme may be found on the CQC <a href="http://www.cqc.org.uk/content/surveys" title="Patient Survey Programme" ,="" target="_blank">Patient Survey Programme</a> web pages.<br>
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</p> The <i>Ambulance Service Survey, 2004</i> was designed to provide actionable feedback to each participating trust on patients' views of the ambulance care they had received in England, as well as providing the Healthcare Commission with patient-focused indicators to feed into the 2004 performance ratings for acute and specialist NHS trusts.<br>
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The survey covered only emergency ('999') and urgent calls attended by ambulance NHS trusts. It includes both patients who were taken by the ambulance crew to hospital, and those who were attended to but not taken to hospital. Many trusts also provide patient transport services to take patients to and from hospital and clinic appointments, but these services are not covered by this survey. Patients were asked to complete the survey by thinking about their most recent experience of the ambulance emergency or urgent service.<br>