Objectives To demonstrate a statistical method to enable the identification of key drivers of quality from a patient perspective that can be used by service providers to help drive improvement.


Design Cross-tabulation, Chi-square analysis and Cramer's V calculation using SPSS software of NHS Inpatient Surveys 2006 and 2007.


Setting The NHS Inpatient Survey is a standardized survey designed by the Picker Institute conducted on a sample of patients across all acute care hospital trusts in England.


Participants The surveys (available from the UK Data Archive) provide anonymized patient data for over 77,000 patients in 2006 and 72,000 patients in 2007.


Main outcome measures Cramer's V score testing associations between patient ratings on multiple components of care and ratings on the overall quality of care.


Results Of the 58 questions analysed, some questions correlate more strongly with overall satisfaction of care than others and there is strong agreement of results over the two years. Of the top 20 rated components, communication (both between professionals and between professionals and patients) and trust engendered by that communication is a recurring theme.


Conclusions Hospital trusts are required to develop quality indicators and collate detailed feedback from patients in addition to the annual inpatient survey to measure these. To make best use of resources, additional data collection should focus on those aspects of care of most importance to patients locally. This analysis demonstrates a statistical technique that can help to identify such priority areas by showing those aspects of care most strongly associated with the overall rating of care. The analysis uses national level data to demonstrate how this can be achieved. This shows the importance to patients of being treated with dignity and respect, and good communication between staff and between staff and patients.