Undertaking a Survey

Any individual or group (one of whom must be an OAA member) wishing to have an audit project carried out under the auspices of the OAA should first register for the online system (or login if already registered)

Register to Propose an OAA Survey:

Once Registered, you will be able to create your Survey Proposal and submit it to the OAA Survey Committee for consideration.

You will be asked to confirm that your Survey Proposal:

• Does not duplicate any previous OAA Surveys
• Is relevant to obstetric anaesthesia

There must be no commercial advertising in the surveys

Surveys will be assessed every three months by the Surveys Subcommittee. The deadline for submissions will be:

31st March

30th June

30th September

31st December

After these deadlines all surveys submitted in the previous 3 months will be peer reviewed by the OAA's Survey Sub Committee. Comments, suggestions for improvement, rejection etc are collated by the Chair and authors should receive a reply within 4 weeks. The most important and relevant surveys submitted will be selected to go forward to the revision and reassessment stage. Once final approval has been given, authors will be sent an OAA 'seal of approval' and a survey number.

A charge of £150 is made by the OAA for use of the online system which goes towards maintenance and costs incurred (including monitoring, author assistance, loading data for participants etc). This amount will be refunded in full once the OAA receives a full report on the completed survey.

The survey system will require input of:

• A covering letter which will accompany the survey. The letter needs to explain whether this is a survey of individual practice or whether lead clinicians are being asked to comment on the practice of their Unit
• Background information (including references) as to why the survey is thought to be necessary

The surveys committee considers each survey based on a number of areas:

• Relevance - will it produce meaningful data?
• Repeated data - a very similar survey must not have been submitted within the last 2 years
• Applicability - will it change or improve practice?
• Educational value
• How well the survey is constructed

To encourage response, it is important that the survey:

• Has a consultant as a co-author
• Is as concise as possible (10 questions being the optimum but no more than 15)
• Has unambiguous questions

The response rate for the various groups can be expected to be as shown below (taken from surveys undertaken from 2016):

Group	Response Rate
Lead Obstetric Anaesthetists	51 - 56%
UK Consultant members	42 - 48%
All UK members	31 - 46%
Trainee members	45% (prior to 2016)
UK & overseas members	no figures available

Once approval has been given:

• A Survey Number will be allocated
• An invoice for £150 will be emailed to the survey originator
• Circulation will normally follow the listed order at approximately three-week intervals (see note above) to avoid overlap and to encourage a good response. The order may vary if any survey is not ready or if payment has not been received

Payment:

• Payment must be made before the survey can be launched.

Following the survey activation:

• A time-limit will be set for completion of the survey by participants (normally 3 months)
• Up to two reminders will be sent to non-responders
• Responses can be viewed by the originator at any stage via the survey system
• The originator will be notified when the survey has closed

Following Completion:

• The sub-committee will expect a summary of the results (this should not interfere with publication in a journal)
• The OAA should be informed of details of any acceptance as a free paper abstract or other publication. These will be noted, and if possible linked, on the website survey list
• Authors are also invited to offer pdf files of displayed meeting posters resulting from the survey