Local views
VOICES is a postal questionnaire about experiences of end of life care in the last months of life, focusing on quality of care and services received, domains for which patient and proxy agreement are good. The VOICES questionnaire uses the post-bereavement method to gather information from bereaved relatives, friends or carers acting as proxies. The following domains are included:
- Care provided at home
- Urgent care provided out-of-hours
- Care provided by district and community nurses
- Care provided by the GP
- Hospital care
- Hospice care
- Care provided in the last two days of life, across all care settings
- Circumstances surrounding the death (to include Preferred Priorities for Care and care for bereaved relatives)
- Demographic factors
The survey has been conducted nationally in 2011 and these results are available on a PCT cluster level only (i.e. Bedfordshire and Luton)
The data presented here relates to 480 responses. This was a response rate of 46% which is similar to national response rate.
Summary of all responses
When interpreting these results care needs to be taken as the sample is still a relatively small proportion of the total population that died and those that did reply may not be representative of the whole group. The allocation to the lowest and highest 20% is an arbitrary division and due to low numbers none of the individual question response show a statistically significant difference from the England scores. There is also the fact that this survey covers both Bedfordshire and Luton PCT cluster and there is a time lag between the date of the survey (2011) and the publication of the results so that the results may not reflect the current position. Notwithstanding these caveats, there is trend for the responses to be not as good as neighbouring cluster PCTs. Pain relief appears to be relatively positive, but many other areas of care are not rated well. District and community nurses along with hospital nurses and out of hours care is nor as well rated as GPs, care home staff or hospital doctors.
Last updated Friday, 22nd April 2016