The Department of Health has launched a consultation, as required under the Code of Practice for Official Statistics, to seek feedback on a proposal to stop producing a report on the self-reported experience of patients from black and minority ethnic groups.
The consultation period will run from 19 November 2010 until 18 February 2011
"Reporting on results from patient surveys is an important way of measuring how well the NHS is meeting the needs of people who use it. It shows the extent to which the NHS is responding to the needs of users and shaping its services to meet those needs.
The National Patient Survey Programme (NPSP), overseen by the Care Quality Commission (CQC), is an important source of data for this reporting. The programme gives us feedback from survey questionnaires filled in by individual patients.
We use the data from the NPSP in several different ways to produce summaries, reports and statistics, to give us different insights into the type and quality of experience patients are getting in the NHS. This consultation is about one of those summary reports, the ‘Report on the experience of black and minority ethnic patients' referred to later as ‘The BME report'. The report uses a very technical method to examine whether the experiences of patients in black and minority ethnic groups differ from the experience of White British patients.
The NPSP will continue to collect data on the ethnic category of patients, and the CQC will publish summaries of the ‘raw' data as they do now. The Department of Health and other organisations will continue to examine the ‘raw' data as they become available to see what we can learn about the experience of BME patients. We will check whether there are any changes in patterns of care that we need to take into account.
However, we are of the view that the form of analysis in this particular report has served its purpose and there is no merit in repeating it. This consultation therefore seeks views on our proposal to stop producing the report. To round off this work, we plan to publish details about how the analysis was carried out, so that others can analyse any new data in this way if they wish to.
It is important that we consult on this decision, because the reports were labelled as ‘National Statistics'. This means that they meet particular quality standards recognised by the UK Statistics Authority. One of those requirements is that we consult with people who use the figures before we take a decision to stop producing them (even though our report is based on a ‘re-analysis' of the figures, rather than publishing any new data).
The reasons for not wanting to continue the report are largely technical, but are summarised here:
i) We are seeking feedback from users as part of this consultation, but our current view is that the statistics, whilst very good technically, are quite difficult to interpret and have been of limited use to those who need to use them. Some people find it easier to look at the raw data, even though the results can be obscured by other factors, like the age or gender of the patients.
ii) We need to balance the needs of users with the resources required to produce our reports, and it is hard to make a case for this particular form of report.
iii) Whilst the report does tell us about variations between the experiences of people in different ethnic groups, the two editions of the report were almost identical in their main messages. This does not mean that things are not changing in the NHS, but that our measures are not refined enough to detect any change. In layman's terms, we might describe our measures as a ‘blurry ruler, in which the blurring is bigger than any changes we hope to measure.
iv) The existing reports provide a useful ‘snapshot' summary of current variations in experience, and are likely to provide a useful source of data for the next few years without the need for further reports.
This consultation is largely a technical one. Under rules governing National Statistics, we have a statutory requirement to consult with people who use our statistics before we make substantive changes to them - including proposals to stop them. This consultation is therefore aimed at anyone who uses, or who may use, our BME reports, including NHS employees and members of the public."