This survey and your personal data: Adult Inpatient Survey 2024
IQVIA are inviting you to take part in this research on behalf of the Trust and the Care Quality Commission (CQC). The research will help us understand what is good about inpatient care and whether any improvements are needed.
This Privacy Notice explains who we are, the personal data we collect, how we use it, who we share it with, and what your legal rights are.
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NHS Trusts operate within a given geographic area and are responsible for providing hospital services, community services and/or other aspects of patient care.
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You can find the privacy policy for the Trust at www.cqc.org.uk/about-us
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The Care Quality Commission (CQC) is the independent regulator of health and adult social care in England. You can find more information about CQC at www.cqc.org.uk/about-us
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Additionally, you can find the privacy statement for CQC at www.cqc.org.uk/about-us/our-policies/privacy-statement
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IQVIA is a specialist health research partner that will be administering the NHS Adult Inpatient Survey 2024. They have been appointed as an approved research contractor by the Care Quality Commission, and have been commissioned by your hospital trust to conduct the research on their behalf.
You can find out more about IQVIA at https://www.iqvia.com/locations/united-kingdom/solutions/nhs-solutions/insight-and-feedback
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Additionally, you can find the privacy statement for IQVIA at: https://www.iqvia.com/about-us/privacy
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The Survey Coordination Centre, based at Picker, has been appointed by the Care Quality Commission to coordinate the Adult Inpatient Survey 2024 across all hospital trusts and approved research contractors.
How did you get my child’s details?
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IQVIA is contacting you on behalf of your hospital trust and the Care Quality Commission. Names were chosen from patients who had been an inpatient with an overnight stay and were discharged in November 2024 from a hospital at your trust. Your trust has shared a limited amount of your personal data so that IQVIA can invite you to take part in this research. This data includes:
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Your name, address and NHS number
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Your date of birth
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Your mobile phone number as recorded on hospital records
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For analysis purposes for this survey a limited amount of additional personal information (your gender and ethnicity) and health information has also been shared. This is for analysis purposes only and will be held separately to the contact information described above.
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IQVIA will keep your data confidential and will only use your contact details to send you invitations and reminders for this survey.
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If you take part in the survey, your pseudonymised data will be shared with the research team at the Survey Coordination Centre who will keep your data confidential and will be doing the analysis of the data. Fully anonymised datasets will also be shared with the Care Quality Commission for research purposes only.
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Once the survey is finished, IQVIA will securely destroy your contact details within 12 months.
What is our legal basis for processing your personal data?
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IQVIA require a legal basis to process your personal data. Our legal basis for processing your / your child’s personal data under Article 6(1) (e) of the General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) 2018 is ‘public task’, for “the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the controller” – in which case is provided by CQC as a regulator of health and social care in England. If you wish to withdraw your consent at any time, please see the section below covering ‘Your Rights’.
Do I have to take part?
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Taking part is entirely voluntary and choosing not to take part will have no effect on the care you receive now or in the future. Additionally, you do not need to provide a reason.
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You can choose to withdraw your participation at any time, without needing to provide a reason.
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We are asking you to complete a questionnaire about your experience as an inpatient at the trust named in the letter you received about this survey.
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The survey will include questions about your experience, including your treatment and care.
Treatment function code which details the specialised service where a patient is treated. You can find more information on treatment function codes at: https://www.datadictionary.nhs.uk/attributes/treatment_function_code.html
Admission method which details how you were admitted to hospital. You can find more information on admission method at: https://www.datadictionary.nhs.uk/attributes/admission_method.html
ICD-10 Chapter Codewhich details the diagnoses of the condition for which you were admitted to hospital.
NHS Site code at admission and discharge which details the sites where you received your care and treatment.
Length of hospital stay which provides how long you spent in hospital, in total number of days.
Virtual ward indicator which details whether you were admitted onto a virtual ward (otherwise known as a ‘hospital at home’) following your stay in hospital.
IQVIA will keep your contact details in the strictest confidence in accordance with this Privacy Policy and use them solely for this research.
Your contact details will be kept separate from any answers and will only be shared with the research team at IQVIA.
IQVIA and the Survey Coordination Centre will keep any survey responses in strict confidence in accordance with this Privacy Policy.
No identifiable data will be shared outside of IQVIA, and it will not be possible to identify you or your child in any published results.
IQVIA is working with several supplier organisations to assist us in running this survey.
These include but are not limited to suppliers relating to:-
The Survey Coordination Centre is a specialist research team based at Picker who will be responsible for collating and analysing the pseudonymised results for the Adult Inpatient Survey 2024 on behalf of CQC.
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Therefore, on completion of fieldwork, IQVIA will provide the Survey Coordination Centre with your pseudonymised response data. Please note this will not include your contact details. Postcodes will be shared for analysis purposes.
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IQVIA, the Survey Coordination Centre and all suppliers are compliant with the General Data Protection Regulations.
How will IQVIA ensure my personal information is secure?
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IQVIA takes their information security responsibilities seriously and apply various precautions to ensure your information is protected from loss, theft or misuse. Security precautions include appropriate physical security of offices and controlled and limited access to computer systems.
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Both IQVIA and the Survey Coordination Centre have regular internal and external audits of their information security controls and working practices and are accredited to the International Standard for Information Security, ISO 27001.
Does this survey use Cookies or similar code?
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Some online surveys collect information through the use of ‘cookies’. These are small files stored on your computer. These files are used as sparingly as possible and only for quality control, validation and, more importantly, to prevent us sending you reminders for an online survey you have already completed. It is possible for you to delete ‘cookies’ or to prevent their use by adjusting the browser settings on your computer.
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We also automatically capture information about your operating system, display settings and browser type, in order to ensure that the survey questionnaire is delivered in a form suited to the software your computer is using. We do not capture any other information from your computer.
How long will IQVIA retain my personal data and identifiable responses?
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IQVIA will only retain your data in a way that can identify you for as long as is necessary to support the research project and findings. In practice, this means that once we have satisfactorily obtained the research data, we will securely remove your personal, identifying data from our systems.
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We will delete your personal contact details no later than 12 months from the time they are received from your hospital trust. For this project we will securely remove your personal data from our systems by 31st July, 2026.
Your rights and the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) 2018
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You have the right to access your personal data within the period that IQVIA holds it.
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Providing responses to this survey is entirely voluntary and is done so with your consent. You have the right to withdraw your consent to our processing of your personal data at any time, although once data is analysed it is not possible to withdraw your data from the outputs.
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You also have the right to rectify any incorrect or out-of-date personal data about you which we may hold.
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If you want to exercise your rights, please contact us at the below IQVIA address.
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We must generally respond to requests in relation to your rights within one month, although there are some exceptions to this.
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We hope that we can resolve any query or concern you raise about our use of your information. If you wish to contact us, please use the details below.
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You also have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) or another data protection regulator if you have concerns on how we have processed your personal data. You can find details about how to contact the Information Commissioner’s Office at
ico.org.uk/global/contact-us/ or by sending an email to: casework@ico.org.uk. -
All of your personal data used and collected for this survey will be stored by IQVIA in data centres and servers within the United Kingdom and EEA.
About NHS Trusts, the Care Quality Commission, and IQVIA
What will I be asked to do?
Have you got access to my health data?
A very limited amount of your health information has been shared with IQVIA and will be held separately from any contact information. This information will be used for national, trust-level and integrated care system-level analysis and will help CQC to better understand the survey data and the experiences of adults using inpatient services across England.
The health information includes: