Guidance for 2009-10 Personal Social Services User Experience Survey of Carers

This survey has been developed due to a need to learn more about whether or not services received by carers are helping them in their caring role and their life outside of caring, and also their perception of services provided to the cared for person.

Very little is known as to whether or not these services have improved carers' ability to care and live a life outside this role. The need to take into account the impact on carers of the provision and quality of services provided to service users is also important. Carers are a key and important policy area within the Department of Health (DH) and the Care Quality Commission (CQC). The survey aims to collect information about carers' experiences of social care services and support, and the survey will feed into monitoring of the impact of the national carers strategy.

A Pilot Carers Survey was successfully run in April 2009 in which 25 councils took part. The survey used in the pilot was adopted from a survey initially used by Kent County Council. This was reviewed, re-developed and tested with carers to include some different questions that have fed into the final survey to aid national monitoring of the national carers strategy.

Summary

The survey should cover a sample of carers who are aged 18 or over when the questionnaires are distributed, and who are helping or looking after someone aged 18 or over.

The questionnaire should be sent out in November 2009 and should be posted back to the council, with chasing as necessary.

Councils need to send individual data to The NHS Information Centre via the secure Data Depot facility by 28 February 2010.

The questionnaire contains 39 core questions with an additional 19 questions made optional for councils to complete, these questions are annotated in blue on the model questionnaire itself and on Appendix A for reference purposes. The questions on age, gender and ethnicity of the carer can only be omitted if you can provide the information from your own records. The remaining questions in blue can be removed but this will obviously limit the usefulness of the survey to you.

Guidance

In addition to the complete guidance document, example survey forms and other documents for use in the survey can be downloaded from the links below.

• Guidance for Personal Social Services User Experience Survey of Carers 2009-10 (pdf 215KB).
• Frequently asked questions (pdf 219KB)
• Model questionnaire (doc 388KB).
• Ethnicity codes (xls 29KB).
• Sample size calculator (xls 81KB).
• Large print questionnaire (doc 411KB).
• Telephone script (doc 399KB).
• Face to face script (doc 402KB).
• General covering letter example (as advised by Social Care – Research Ethics Committee) (doc 31KB).
• Interview covering letter example (doc 66KB).
• Appendix D - PSSRU Carers Survey Report (pdf 625KB).
• Carers survey data return (xls 2.9MB).
• Validation Checks - Error Explanations (pdf 330KB).

Translated questionnaires

• Arabic (doc 439KB).
• Bengali (doc 522KB).
• Chinese (doc 386KB).
• Greek (doc 392KB).
• Gujarati (doc 477KB).
• Somali (doc 416KB).
• Hindi (doc 439KB).
• Punjabi (doc 395KB).
• Turkish (doc 468KB).
• Urdu (doc 406KB).
• Vietnamese (doc 418KB).

The excel spreadsheet data return for returning the data back to The NHS Information Centre will soon be available for councils to download from the secure Data Depot Internet facility. All user survey contacts will soon receive an email telling them how to log on to the Data Depot.

If you cannot find the email containing the log on details, or you have not received it and you think you should have, please contact usersurvey@ic.nhs.uk.

Queries

Queries on this survey should be sent to usersurvey@ic.nhs.uk.