Abstract

The Cancer Patient Experience Survey has been running since 2010 and is sent to all patients in England who are seen for treatment in an NHS hospital during a three month period, and who had a primary diagnosis of cancer. About 60,000 responses are received each year; respondents are asked about their experiences across the whole patient journey, from before they were diagnosed with cancer, to follow up care after discharge from hospital. Over the past few years, I have been involved in several pieces of research using this survey. One of these projects compared the ethnicity reported in an individual’s hospital record, with the ethnicity they self-reported in their survey response. A second explored whether differential response rates between hospitals are a challenge to the validity of organisation performance comparisons based on the survey findings. In this talk I will describe both these pieces of work, as exemplars of contemporary / novel findings from patient experience surveys; I will also introduce the survey itself, and the broader contexts in which it is used.