DPH: Health and Care Experience Survey 2025-26

The Scottish Government has a requirement to place a contract with an external service provider for the provision of the Health and Care Experience Survey 2025. The scope of the contract will be to undertake the survey fieldwork and the transfer of a clean data set.

The survey is being undertaken as part of the Scottish Government’s Care Experience Programme and will be managed by Health and Social Care Analysis Division in the Scottish Government, in partnership with the Public Health Scotland (PHS). The Scottish Government has a requirement to place a contract with an external service provider for the provision of the Health & Care Experience Survey 2025.

Making healthcare more person centred lies at the heart of the NHS Scotland Quality Strategy ambitions. The Scottish Care Experience Survey Programme has been designed to support this ambition by giving people the opportunity to comment systematically on their experience of healthcare and its impact on their quality of life.

The programme comprises a suite of surveys, including inpatient, health and care, maternity and cancer care. The Survey is a biennial postal survey which first ran in 2009.

The Survey, which originally focused on primary care services, was expanded in 2013 to accommodate questions on social care and carers, reflecting the move towards health and social care integration in Scotland and further refined in 2017 to reflect new policy priorities. The 2025 survey content will be reviewed prior to the commencement of fieldwork to ensure that the survey questions are still relevant and meet user needs, however we are not anticipating any substantial changes from the 2023 survey.

The scope of the contract will be to undertake the survey fieldwork and the transfer of a clean data set. The initial survey pack will include a letter with QR code providing a link to the online survey and an information leaflet in a range of languages.

A reminder pack will be sent to people who had not responded to this initial letter after a couple of weeks. The reminder pack will include a reminder letter, an information leaflet and a paper copy of the questionnaire.

This involves printing and posting the survey packs to around 500,000 to people registered with a GP practice in Scotland, which requires the services of an experienced survey contractor with specialist equipment. The survey contractor will be required to scan and capture the completed questionnaires, and carry out agreed validation checks on the data before securely transmitting a clean data set to the Scottish Government. There is no in-house facility to administer such a large volume of surveys.