DOI: 10.5255/ukda-sn-6745-1
title: Maternity Services Survey, 2010
title: National Health Service Patient Survey Programme, 2003-
title: 2010 Survey of Maternity Services; NHS Patient Survey Programme; Maternity Survey

description: &lt;p&gt;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.&lt;br&gt;
&lt;br&gt;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.&lt;br&gt;
&lt;br&gt;
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.&lt;br&gt;
&lt;br&gt;
&lt;i&gt;History of the programme&lt;br&gt;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;br&gt;
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.&lt;br&gt;
&lt;br&gt;
Further information about the National Patient Survey Programme may be found on the CQC &lt;a href="http://www.cqc.org.uk/content/surveys" title="Patient Survey Programme" ,="" target="_blank"&gt;Patient Survey Programme&lt;/a&gt; web pages.&lt;br&gt;
&lt;br&gt;
&lt;/p&gt; The &lt;i&gt;Maternity Services Survey, 2010&lt;/i&gt; was designed to provide actionable feedback to each participating trust on patients’ views of the care they had received in England, as well as providing CQC with data to assist with registration of trusts and monitoring on-going compliance. The survey is a follow-up to the &lt;i&gt;Maternity Survey, 2007&lt;/i&gt; which is available from the UK Data Archive under SN 5785.&lt;br&gt;
&lt;br&gt;
All women who had given birth in England in February, 2010 were invited to take part in the survey, except those who had a stillbirth or whose baby had died since delivery, and those aged 16 or under at the time of their baby’s birth. Women were sent a questionnaire approximately three months after they had given birth.&lt;br&gt;
&lt;br&gt;
The survey covers issues that affect the quality of care that patients receive and were identified by patients as important to them. The questionnaire covered each of the three main stages in maternity care: during pregnancy (antenatal care), during labour and delivery and after the birth (postnatal care).&lt;br&gt;
&lt;br&gt;
The dataset includes the responses of 144 NHS trusts (142 were acute (hospital) trusts and two were primary care trusts). One PCT was included as it is responsible for providing acute maternity care services in addition to community midwifery services that other PCTs may also provide. The other is a combined trust providing acute, ambulance, PCT and mental health services. The results from one trust were excluded for some of the questions in the survey due to them having a considerably smaller maternity unit and only a very small number of women in their sample. This has only been the case where they have less then 30 responses for a question.&lt;br&gt;