Have your say in patient survey

Local people registered with a GP practice in Tameside and Glossop will soon be invited to take part in Europe's biggest patient experience survey about their experiences of local NHS services.

The GP Patient Survey is an independent survey run by Ipsos MORI, on behalf of NHS England. Around 2.3 million people, aged 16 and over, who are registered with a GP practice in England will receive an invitation by letter.

It's designed to give patients the opportunity to feed back about their experiences of their GP practice and covers issues that concern patients, such as access to care and satisfaction with treatment, how easy or hard it is to make an appointment, satisfaction with opening hours, the quality of care received, and more.

The data provides 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 ethnic groups or people with other protected characteristics. 

Last year’s survey helped the NHS to learn more about the high proportion of people who have caring responsibilities and about how this affects their experiences of using health services.

In Tameside and Glossop, the data is analysed each year to understand where practices are facing challenges. This information is used to support practices to focus on their individual areas of challenge via workshops and targeted support with individual practices.

Anyone who receives a questionnaire is urged to help NHS England by filling it in as soon as possible.

Dr Ashwin Ramachandra, Co-Chair at NHS Tameside and Glossop Clinical Commissioning, said: “Over the last twelve challenging months GP practices have had to make some changes in response to the Covid-19 pandemic so they could continue to provide their services.  As a result, it is more important than ever that a patient’s experience of local NHS services during this period, even if they haven’t visited their GP practice in a long time, or filled in a questionnaire before, are heard.

“The more people who respond to their invitation to take part in the survey, the better the quality of information received about experiences of using general practice.”

For more information, search online for GP Patient Survey or visit http://www.gp-patient.co.uk/