Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, pursuant to the Answer of 15 December 2022 to Question 104474 on Health Services: Travellers, whether his Department is taking steps to help improve engagement with the GP Patient Survey for people from Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller backgrounds.

NHS England are working to increase engagement with the GP Patient Survey overall by making the survey as accessible as possible, to encourage as many people to respond as possible.

A number of initiatives have been tested and implemented to improve response rates, including post card reminders, now upgraded to text message reminders, updating the invitation letters with messaging which encourages people to take part and adding the National Health Service logo to the envelope to increase the credibility of the survey.

The survey sample used is drawn from the Personal Demographics Service (PDS), which does not hold information on patients’ ethnic group. As NHS England do not have the ethnic group information at the time of sampling, they are unable able to implement targeted approaches.

Although the latest survey data has relatively small numbers of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller respondents, the findings are still valuable at a national level, and they demonstrate the different experience of those communities.