Picker awarded multi-year contract to oversee England’s NHS Patient Survey Programme by the Care Quality Commission

International healthcare charity Picker is delighted to announce it has been awarded the next iteration of a multi-year contract to coordinate the full suite of NHS Patient Survey Programme (NPSP) surveys, working closely with the Care Quality Commission (CQC), the independent regulator of health and social care in England, and stakeholders. 

The NHS Patient Survey programme asks patients and service users about their recent health care experiences.  The findings from these surveys provide organisations with detailed feedback on standards of care and can be used to help set priorities for delivering a better service for patients. The survey results are used by the Care Quality Commission to measure and monitor performance at both local and national levels and enable providers to make improvements based on what really matters to people. The full programme includes a range of national surveys, including surveys of recent child and adult users of hospital services, recent mothers, and mental health service users. Picker has been involved in designing and coordinating the national patient survey programme since its inception in 2002.

During this time, Picker has successfully delivered many improvements including:

• a redesign of the original Children and Young People survey;
• expansion of the Emergency Care Survey to include Urgent Care Services;
• reporting improvements such as releasing results quicker under embargo;
• data visualisation improvements to help providers interpret their data better; and
• more granular analysis and reporting to enable providers to ‘drill down’ into the data to support quality improvement initiatives.

Picker has also completed feasibility studies regarding potential new surveys and has undertaken reporting improvements to support better understanding and use of the data.

Chris Graham, Picker Group CEO, said: 

We are delighted to renew our contract with the Care Quality Commission. We look forward to continuing our long association with the NHS Patient Survey Programme, working closely with CQC and stakeholders to ensure that the surveys provide effective data for regulation and powerful insight to improve standards of person centred care.

Understanding and acting on people’s experiences of care is of fundamental importance for all providers. Having had the pleasure of being involved in the national programme for many years, we understood how important the evidence it delivers can be – and the impact that resulting actions can have in improving the quality of patient care. We are proud to have been trusted with the crucial role of providing the survey coordination centre, and are committed to ensuring that it supports our and CQC’s shared goal: supporting health and care organisations to provide high-quality services informed by patient, service user, and carer experiences.