This document provides data on the response rates of different population groups responding to the National Cancer Patient Experience Survey (CPES), which will help us to understand how well the responses collected reflect the make-up of the eligible population and which groups are less likely to respond.
Response rates are calculated by comparing the total number of patients invited to take part in the survey with the total number of patients who responded. Patients were eligible for CPES if they are over the age of 16, with a primary diagnosis of cancer, who have been admitted to hospital as inpatients for cancer related treatment, or seen as day case patients for cancer related treatment, and were discharged between April and June each year. The total number of eligible patients is known as the sample size in this document. The response rate is the number of respondents divided by the sample size, which produces a percentage.
The first section details the response rates, both overall and then by different demographic group. These can be viewed across the survey years to see if particular groups are changing over time. In each table, the difference compared with the overall response rate can be seen, flagging where some groups may be underrepresented in the survey compared with others.
The second section shows the demographic profile of the sample, so you can see which groups make up larger and smaller proportions of it, and how this has changed over time.
The demographics used to split response rate are:
Age is derived from the date of birth provided by the trust.
Index of multiple deprivation (IMD) is a location based measure of deprivation which gives a score to every Lower Layer Super Output Area (LSOA) in England then these can be split into 5 equal groups called quintiles in order to group patients into similar levels of deprivation. The respondent’s postcode of residence is then used to map them to an IMD quintile which can then be used for reporting.
Ethnicity is taken directly from the data provided by the trusts. This data does not match directly to the self-reported ethnicity in the survey results. For this report, ethnicity categories have been grouped into higher-level groupings (White, Mixed, Asian, Black, Chinese, Other, Unknown/Not stated/Missing).
Tumour group is derived from the patient ICD10 code provided to us by the trust and is then mapped to a set of clinical groups that are used for reporting.
Cancer type is also derived from the patient ICD10 code provided to us by the trust. It is a more specific, granular description of a patient’s cancer.
To protect patient anonymity, data suppression has been applied to results where the total count for a particular demographic group is less than 5 patients and the eligible total population is under 1000. In the case of suppression, values will be missing from both tables and graphs.
At national level the eligible population is always well above 1,000, so this rule does not trigger; as a safety net, any individual demographic group with only 1 or 2 people is still suppressed.
In cases where there were no results for a particular demographic group the total and percentage will be 0.
Total sample size is 108,323 for 2019, 102,946 for 2021, 111,934 for 2022, 117,965 for 2023, 123,319 for 2024 and 134,285 for 2025. Below shows the response rates overall and the response rates split by various demographics.
Only a table is shown here, due to the number of cancer types being too large to display on a chart.
Total sample size is 108,323 for 2019, 102,946 for 2021, 111,934 for 2022, 117,965 for 2023, 123,319 for 2024 and 134,285 for 2025. The charts and tables below show the make-up of this sample when split by certain demographic breakdowns.
Only a table is shown here, due to the number of cancer types being too large to display on a chart.
This section compares the sample composition (who was invited) with the respondents composition (who actually replied), so you can see where groups are over- or under-represented among those who responded.
Only tables are shown here, due to the number of cancer types being too large to display on a chart.