The Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has been recognised for delivering high-quality, compassionate care in the latest NHS Adult Inpatient Survey 2024, placing the Trust in the top 25% of all NHS trusts for overall inpatient experience.
The survey, published this week by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) looked at the experiences of 62,444 people, across 131 NHS trusts, who stayed at least one night in hospital as an inpatient during November 2024.
The results show that Newcastle Hospitals continue to perform well across multiple domains, including communication, dignity, and trust in clinical staff.
Key highlights:
- Kindness and compassion: Patients rated their experience of being treated with kindness and compassion at 9.1 out of 10, placing the Trust among the highest scoring nationally.
- Respect and dignity: The Trust achieved a score of 9.2 out of 10, reflecting a strong commitment to treating patients with respect throughout their stay.
- Confidence in staff: Patients expressed higher levels of trust in their care teams, compared to other trusts, with scores of 9.0 for doctors and 8.6 for nurses.
- Post-discharge support: The Trust was rated better than expected for ensuring patients knew who to contact if they had concerns after leaving hospital.
- Improvement over time: Compared to 2023, the Trust showed statistically significant improvement in post-discharge communication, demonstrating its commitment to continuous improvement.
Listening and learning:
In 2025, with the support from Newcastle Hospitals Charity, a dedicated programme monitoring patient experience in real time was added to the overall patient care feedback loop within Newcastle Hospitals, to further understand patients’ experience and help staff act at pace on patient feedback. It is the largest programme in the NHS receiving feedback from more than 100,000 people each year. The commitment is to use this information as an opportunity to listen, learn and improve.
Key areas of focus based on the latest national survey includes:-
- Improving explanations around ward changes during the night
- Increasing patient involvement in discharge planning
- Enhancing access to food outside of set mealtimes
Annie Laverty, Chief Experience Officer at Newcastle Hospitals said, “I’m deeply grateful to the thousands of individuals, patients and families who generously share their feedback with us. Their insights – drawn from experiences across our hospitals and community services – are invaluable in helping us to continuously improve. Thanks to their voices, we’re able to deliver care that is not only safe and effective, but also truly compassionate.”
NHS England has also this week published the first set of results from the new NHS Oversight Framework. The framework has been developed to provide a consistent and transparent approach to assessing wider Trust performance to ensure public accountability across a range of access, patient safety, finance and workforce metrics. Under this framework Newcastle Hospitals ranked in the top 20% of Acute trusts, 26th out of 134.
Patrick Garner, Director of Performance and Governance at Newcastle Hospitals said, “The Trust has made real progress against a number of performance measures over the last year. We have much further to go, but thanks to the dedication of our operational and clinical teams, we’re making real progress in reducing patient waiting times in particular
“We will continue to work to make improvements across all of the areas within the framework alongside other key metrics to help improve the outcomes and experience for the patients we treat from Newcastle and across the region.”
You can find Newcastle Hospitals Adult Inpatient Survey 2024 results here.
