Learning from patients: The impact of using patients’ narratives on patient experience scores (1 March 2024)

Summary

Enthusiasm has grown about using patients’ narratives—stories about care experiences in patients’ own words—to advance organisations’ learning about the care that they deliver and how to improve it, but studies confirming association have not been published.

This study assessed whether primary care clinics that frequently share patients’ narratives with their staff have higher patient experience survey scores. It found that sharing narratives with staff frequently is associated with better patient experience survey scores, conditional on confidence in knowledge.

Frequently sharing useful patient narratives should be encouraged as an organizational improvement strategy. However, organisations need to address how narrative feedback interacts with their staff’s confidence to realize higher experience scores across domains.