Patient-Led Assessments of the Care Environment (PLACE), 2024 - England

Owing to the nature of the collection, retrospective validation is not possible. Accuracy of scoring is achieved through the provision of guidance and training to teams undertaking the assessments, but there is an inherent element of judgement involved. Scores must however be agreed between the staff and patient assessors before data are entered onto EFM. Although it is not a requirement of the process, Independent Review (also known as External Validation) is recommended good practice and in 2024, 224 of the 1093 sites completing valid assessments (20.5%) included this in their assessment. This compares with 225 sites (21.0%) in 2023.

All data are provided by participating organisations through an online reporting system (the Estates and Facilities Management (EFM) system, or via one of the mobile reporting solutions. All possible responses to each question are provided by a ‘drop down’ facility and therefore out-of-range responses are not possible. The collection system additionally has internal validation systems which prevent contradictory responses.

Once an organisation has entered and validated all data their provisional result is produced. At this stage further amendments can be made to data, but not once committed.

Final submission of data cannot be completed until all required responses have been entered. Where any data are missing the collection system will highlight this to the person entering data. Data providers are asked to have senior signoff before committing their data, and once committed no changes to data can be made without prior consultation with NHS England.

Any alterations after commitment of data can only be made with the approval of NHS England, and this will only be carried out in exceptional circumstances. Requests to change assessment data are investigated by NHS England and are generally required to be accompanied by a written statement from the patient assessors to confirm the change is due to a genuine error.

2 sites were excluded as they did not fully complete, validate, and commit their assessments.

A further 12 sites were excluded as they did not fully meet the patient to staff ratio required for the assessments. These included 10 sites where the minimum number of 2 patient assessors not being met at assessments, and 2 sites assessment days where the minimum ratio of 50% patient to staff assessors was not met. Excluding these assessments was necessary because, whilst we appreciate that staff do their best to record an independent view, it does impact the reliability of recording the patient-led “voice” for assessments.

Provided data was entered, organisations are still able to view these assessments and indicative results for their sites on the PLACE-Lite module on our collection system via login (only available to PLACE users).

Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust's site "Oncology Centre, Kent and Canterbury Hospital", scored 0% for the dementia domain (based on a score of 0 points scored out of 2 achievable points). This was due to data input errors, whereby the ward was incorrectly recorded as never admitting patients with dementia, so several questions scoring towards this domain were not included in the ward assessment.