Making patient experience a priority (The King's Fund, 25 October 2023)

Summary

Patient experience is deteriorating across the NHS, so hearing from users should be of the utmost importance as the NHS looks to improve, yet too often those leading work on patient experience feel that it is not prioritised. The King’s Fund has been working with the Heads of Patient Experience (HOPE) network to design and develop projects to better understand how people and communities are experiencing health and care services. This article outlines learning and recommendations from this work.

Content

Key findings

• Patient experience is still not prioritised
• ICSs need to provide clarity about where responsibility for patient experience sits
• Insight from patient experience is still not on an equal footing with other data