Patient experience

Picker lead the development of patient experience measures as a way of understanding the quality of person centred care from the patient’s perspective. By posing carefully designed questions that ask people to report what happened to them during their care or treatment, we are able to build a more robust and meaningful view of care quality than can be obtained through patient satisfaction measures, which can be vague and rarely produce useful insight for service improvement.

We continue to be the leading experts in measuring and understanding patient experience. Our survey methods and questions are used around the world and are valued for the high-quality feedback and insight that they provide.

Why measure patient experience?

Patient experience measures provide a view of the quality of care through the patient’s eyes. This allows us to understand how person centred care is, and what needs to be improved. Importantly, asking about specific, reportable events means that results can be acted upon, because each question addresses a distinct aspect of care.

There are many benefits to measuring patient experience. Not only is there a moral case for listening to and acting on people’s views, but there is growing evidence that better experiences are associated with better patient outcomes; safer care; and better workforce experience. Because surveys can be used to measure people’s experiences reliably and replicably, it is also possible to track trends and investigate differences in quality between different wards, sites, or organisations.

For further insights into our work, have a look at Research and Insights.