Patient and public involvement
The NHS needs to be responsive to patients and service users and more accountable to the citizens who fund it. Section 11 of the Health and Social Care Act 2001 placed a duty on primary care trusts, strategic health authorities and NHS trusts to make arrangements to involve and consult patients and the public in service planning and operation, and in the development of proposals for changes.
Section 2 of Equity and excellence: Liberating the NHS (2010) details the intentions around shared decision-making: "Nothing about me without me". Through choice and an increased voice, local people, patients and service users have a central role in influencing commissioning to ensure that healthcare and social care services are matched to their needs and preferences. Commissioners need to ensure that patients and communities are involved throughout the commissioning process. Commissioners will also need to ensure that processes are in place to understand patient experience of services in order to develop and monitor services. The Operating Framework for the NHS in England 2011/2012 sets out a number of requirements for patient experience and feedback and highlights that patient experience must be a key arbiter of all NHS services. PCTs and providers should continue to ensure that appropriate systems are in place to capture the views and experiences of patients, service users and carers. This will include use of local and nationally coordinated patient surveys, but also a range of additional approaches or sources that are locally relevant, such as the use of real-time feedback collected at the point of care (e.g. SMS texting, Patient Experience Trackers, kiosks), use of complaints data and Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMS). The current PROMs guidance will be revised during 2011 to set out proposals for extending the use, collection and validity of PROMs across the NHS, wherever practicable.
PCTs and providers, working with their partners, should ensure that patient experience and feedback are inherent parts of service design, delivery and improvement. PCTs should also make arrangements to ensure existing information and insight about local people's needs and preferences is not lost during transition and may be readily picked up and used by emerging GP consortia. PCTs must continue to ensure their statutory obligations under the Duty to Involve is effectively and efficiently discharged during transition to commissioning by GP consortia.
More information
NHS Institute for innovation and improvement has developed a number of resources to support organisations with patient experience and engagement:
- The rough guide to experience and engagement for GP Consortia guidance for GP Consortia on the emerging national framework governing engagement and experience and introduction to the Engagement Cycle tool.
- Armchair involvement
- Experienced based design (EBD)
- Children and young people emergency and urgent care engagement tool
- High impact actions for improving patient experience
- Shared decision making
- Patient experience and learning network
- Productive community services (PCS)
This page was last updated: 24 May 2011
