Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the potential implications for the effectiveness of the National Cancer Patient Experience Survey of moving data from NHS trusts to (a) a central point of collection within the NHS and (b) an external survey provider.

Since its inception, the Cancer Patient Experience Survey has followed the same model – whereby trusts provide contact information for those patients eligible to receive the survey. This information is passed to a centrally procured external survey supplier who then runs the survey, receives survey responses from patients and produces the national set of results (with support from central analytical colleagues, particularly in terms of quality assurance of the output). There are no current plans to change the model.