Europe’s biggest patient experience survey gets underway in the New Year

Around 2.2 million people, aged 16 and over, who are registered with a GP practice in England will receive an invitation to take part in Europe’s biggest patient experience survey in the new year.

The invitations go out mainly by letter to a sample of people from each of 7000+ practices. This year, for the first time, the survey team at NHS England and NHS Improvement are piloting digital invitations, so some people may hear from them by text message or email.

Please encourage people who receive an invitation to take the time to fill out and return the questionnaire. If you are able to display a poster from new year to the end of March, that would help NHS England and NHS Improvement to raise awareness.  Downloadable posters are available, in 15 languages, at: https://gp-patient.co.uk/promote.

The survey findings provide vital information to the NHS to identify what’s working well and what can be improved.  It helps identify inequalities in experience too, such as for certain age or racial groups, or people with other protected characteristics, and can provide new information that does not come to light in other ways. Last year, this included learning more about the high proportion of people who are carers to others, and about how this affects their experiences of using health services.

You can check out how practices in your area faired in last year’s survey by visiting https://gp-patient.co.uk/practices-search.

For people who don’t get a questionnaire and are eager to give feedback about their own GP practice, they can have their say at any time by using the Friends and Family Test. Most practices have feedback cards available in waiting areas or on their websites.