NHS Improvement: Patient experience improvement framework (June 2018)

Summary

Improving patient experience is not simple. As well as effective leadership and a receptive culture, trusts need a wholesystems approach to collecting, analysing, using and learning from patient feedback for quality improvement. Without such an approach it is almost impossible to track, measure and drive quality improvement.

NHS Improvements framework brings together the characteristics of trusts that consistently improve patient experience and enables them to carry out an organisational diagnostic to establish how far patient experience is embedded in its leadership, culture and its operational processes.

Content

Providers can use the framework to promote senior-level discussion of the factors such as leadership and culture that underpin an ability to improve patient experience. The framework integrates policy guidance with the most frequent reasons the Care Quality Commission (CQC) gives for rating acute trusts ‘outstanding’.

The following indicators have been identified to help you improve in the following areas: 

• leadership
• organisational culture
• collecting feedback — capacity and capability to effectively collect feedback
• analysis and triangulation — the use of quality intelligence systems to make sense of feedback and to triangulate it with other quality measures 
• reporting — to use patient feedback effectively by learning from it to drive quality improvement.