Patients’ experience of getting through on the telephone for a variety of queries – including consultations and test results – will be explored in the new GP Patient Survey to be launched in January.
The Department of Health has released guidance on the expanded survey, which will be sent to patients in the New Year and then become quarterly from April.
The DH said around 5.5m patients will be invited to take part in the survey each year and that it will explore patients’ experiences of accessing out-of-hours care for the first time.
Other new questions will look at the planning of care for patients with long term conditions and overall satisfaction with GP care, in a survey the DH says will provide “a much richer assessment” of patients’ experiences.
Ipsos MORI has been reappointed to deliver the new survey after a tendering exercise. The DH said it had budgeted approximately £8m for the survey programme this year, compared to approximately £10m last year.
Practices will be unable to opt-out of taking part. The patient sample will be randomly selected by Ipsos MORI from an anonymised list of all eligible patients supplied by the National Health Application and Infrastructure Services database.
The guidance says the DH has a Data Processor Agreement with Ipsos MORI and the arrangements have been approved by NHS Connecting for Health.
In a previous year, the GP Patient Survey was the subject of some controversy when the DH used software from Apollo Medical Systems to extract patient-identifiable data from GP systems.
The new GP Patient Survey will be used to assess practices’ entitlement to the patient experience access indicators in the Quality and Outcomes Framework. From 2009-10 practices will no longer have to conduct their own patient surveys to qualify for QoF points.
The latest survey will be published in January and posted to patients, who will have until 6 April to return it. The guidance states the return date will have a knock-on effect on end of year arrangements for QoF.
The survey results will be available to PCTs and practices in May but not released into the public domain until July.
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