Project aims
The aim of the Future of Patient Feedback project is to redesign how patient feedback is collected, analysed and presented, so it provides a more coherent and joined-up view of patient experience. This includes people receiving care, people managing their own health, family members and unpaid carers. The project will explore how different sources of feedback can work together and better reflect the quality of people’s healthcare experience across services, pathways and settings.
The ambition is not just to capture people’s experiences better, but to do this in a way that supports the system to consistently turn those experiences into better quality care. Making better use of patient feedback can support the system to improve quality, reduce inequalities, strengthen accountability, and support services to respond to changing needs.
What we will do
The project will bring together evidence, patient and public engagement, expert perspectives and NHS staff to answer a central question:
What should a modern, effective and inclusive patient, user and carer feedback system look like?
National Voices is bringing the collective voice of our members and the people and communities they support into the development of the project. Our role is to help ensure that the future approach is grounded in lived experience, reflects the diversity of people’s experiences of health and care, and is designed with people rather than simply for them.
Our work supporting delivery of the project includes:
- Starting with Lived Experience. At the beginning of August, we held a roundtable with our Lived Experience Partners (LEPs), creating an opportunity right from the start of the project for people with lived experience to share their perspectives on what works, what is missing from current approaches to feedback, and what a better system could look like.
- Embedding lived experience and the voluntary and community sector in project governance. We have established an Expert Advisory Group, co-chaired by one of our LEPs. The group also includes two additional LEPs from NHS England and representatives from four VCSE member organisations. This provides an important mechanism for ensuring that lived experience and the expertise of VCSE organisations inform the development of the project throughout, rather than being brought in only at the end.
- Engaging our wider membership and bringing collective insight into the work. We have engaged members through our Heads of Policy meeting, with 61 members attending the first session. This gives us an opportunity to draw on the breadth of knowledge and experience across National Voices’ membership, including organisations representing people with particular conditions, disabilities and experiences of health inequalities.
- Creating opportunities to test and make sense of emerging findings. We will run a further sense-making session during the solutions phase. This will give members an opportunity to respond to the emerging findings and proposed approaches, challenge assumptions and help identify what would make a future feedback system meaningful and workable for the people and communities they support.
- Reaching people and communities whose experiences can be missed by mainstream feedback mechanisms. During the autumn and winter, we will hold a series of deep-dive workshops with condition-focused and equality-focused organisations. These sessions will explore in more depth how different groups experience existing feedback mechanisms, where there are gaps, and what needs to change to make the future approach genuinely inclusive.
- Supporting engagement beyond the national project. We will develop a ‘workshop in a box’ to help local systems undertake their own engagement with patients, service users, carers and communities. This will support the project’s ambition to ensure that the future of patient feedback is shaped not only by national organisations, but by people and communities across the country.
Where can I learn more?
Find out more and keep up to date with the project on The King’s Fund webpage.