2010 Survey Of Women's Experiences Of Maternity Services

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Guide to benchmark reports
2010 Survey of women’s experiences of maternity services

Benchmark reports are produced for most NHS national surveys to show how the survey results for each trust participating in a particular survey compares with the results from all other trusts.

This guide is divided into six sections:

Section one: provides information specific to the 2010 maternity survey
Section two: describes the benchmark reports
Section three: describes how to use the benchmark reports and the limitations of the data
Section four: describes how to understand the data
Section five: provides guidance on using the benchmark reports to make comparisons between trusts
Section six: describes how the data in the benchmark reports is calculated

1.) The 2010 survey of women’s experiences of maternity services

Over 25,000 women from 144 trusts in England responded to the survey between April 2010 and August 2010, a response rate of 52%. Women were eligible for the survey if they had a live birth in February 2010 and were aged 16 or older. Women who gave birth in a hospital, birth centre, or maternity unit, or who had a home birth, were eligible. A similar survey of women using maternity services was carried out in 2007.

The results of the survey are primarily intended to be used by NHS trusts to help them identify areas where they need to improve performance and to note where they have performed well. For this reason we have produced the benchmark reports to allow NHS acute trusts to identify where their score lies in relation to all other acute trusts’ results.

The same data in the trust benchmark reports are also available in the Care Directory in the CQC website (see Further Information section for a link to this). The scores shown there are the same as in the benchmark reports, though are displayed as scores out of 10 rather than 100 (so are the benchmark scores divided by 10). A different approach is used to categorise trusts’ performance in the Care Directory, as it identifies where a trust performed ‘better’, ‘worse’, or ‘about the same’ as expected. Please see the document containing your trust’s Care Directory data for more information, or the explanation provided on the website.

The survey asked women about care received during pregnancy, labour and birth, and in the weeks following the birth of their baby. For some of the survey results, the women may have been referring to care received from their local Primary Care Trust. We have identified 19 questions that are suitable for benchmarking where the results can be directly attributed to the acute trust, rather than PCT. These 19 questions have been scored and are contained in your benchmark report. Results for all other questions will be sent separately to you in the form of weighted percentages of respondents. These are comparable to the results that were published for your trust from the 2007 survey of women’s experiences of maternity services.

We will also be providing an online tool to trusts, PCTs and SHAs following the national publication of results, similar to that provided with the NHS Staff Survey data. This will follow the main publication of the survey, and will be sent to the survey lead at your trust. It contains data from the survey and allows for comparisons with the 2007 survey, as well as across England, SHA and other trusts.

2.) Description of the benchmark reports
The graphs included in the reports display the scores for a trust, compared with national benchmarks. Each bar represents the range of results for each question across all trusts that took part in the survey. In the graphs, the bar is divided into three sections:

• the red section (left hand end) shows the scores for the 20% of trusts with the lowest scores
• the green section (right hand end) shows the scores for the 20% of trusts with the highest scores
• the orange section (middle section) represents the range of scores for the remaining 60%