Updated trust-level benchmark reports

How can the reports help you make sense of the data?

Following extensive consultation with NHS trusts, stakeholders and patients, the trust-level benchmark reports have been redeveloped to increase their usefulness for trusts. This page highlights the added value of the redeveloped reports, and summarises how trusts can use the reports to highlight organisational strengths and drive improvement where needed.

What added value do these reports provide?

In addition to presenting data visually and in a variety of ways, the benchmark reports produced by the Care Quality Commission and coordination centre will provide you with robust and high-quality results which you can use to drive service improvement.

The reports use an ‘expected range’ analysis technique which has been improved this year to include more nuanced categories to determine if your trust is performing better, worse, or about the same compared with most other trusts. Importantly, this is a national comparison with all other trusts who took part in the survey. The analysis is also included at site level.

The reports also standardise data by demographics for each trust, to help ensure no trust will appear better or worse than another because of its demographic profile. We recommend using standardised data as this enables a fairer and more useful comparison of results across trusts. In most cases this standardisation will not have a large impact on trust results, but are essential to maintain comparability and analytical rigour. Site level results are standardised in the same way.

New and improved content

Trusts told us that the survey data is primarily used to monitor change over time and compare performance with other trusts. With this in mind, new content was tested with trusts, and implemented in the reports where it provided value. The exact report content will vary slightly across the five surveys in the NHS Patient Survey Programme, but will include features such as:

  • A headline findings section to provide an overview of results for your trust upfront.
  • Information about the population of patients who took part in the survey, to help you interpret responses and provide insight into your patient population.
  • A summary of the number of questions at which your trust performed better, worse, or about the same compared with all other trusts, alongside a list of the questions within each category.
  • The ‘top five’ and ‘bottom five’ scores for your trust, calculated by comparing your trust’s results to the trust average.
  • A benchmarking section using the ‘expected range’ analysis technique to show how your trust scored for each evaluative question in the survey compared with other trusts that took part. This allows you to see the range of scores achieved and can provide you with an indication of where you perform better than the average, and what you should aim for in areas where you may wish to improve. Based on feedback from trusts, the number of categories used in the ‘expected range’ analysis has been increased to provide more nuance on performance. Each chart also shows how your trust scored compared with the trust average.
  • A benchmarking chart using the ‘expected range’ analysis technique for each section score, which also shows the range of results for NHS trusts ranked from lowest to highest score.
  • Long-term trend results for your trust. This will show how the performance of each trust has changed over time, and whether this trend follows the average trend in England.
  • Site level benchmarking results allowing you to compare the results for sites within your trust with all other sites across England. For trusts with multiple sites, internal benchmarking may be helpful so you can compare sites within your organisation, sharing best practice within the trust and identifying any sites that may need attention.
  • A comparison with other trusts within your region, which may be helpful so you can learn from and share learnings with trusts in your area who care for similar populations.
  • A ‘poster style’ summary of the top five and bottom five questions for your trust, enabling you to easily share a simplified summary of your results with staff and/or patients.

    • More information

    The redeveloped benchmark reports for the 2020 Adult Inpatient Survey have been published and can be found on the 2020 benchmark reports page. Going forwards, other surveys in the NHS Patient Survey Programme will also produce redeveloped benchmark reports at the time of publication..