Change NHS – what does Picker want to see in the upcoming ten-year plan?
Patient experience has been acknowledged as central to the delivery of healthcare in recent decades, including in the NHS Plan (2000), Lord Darzi’s ‘High quality care for all’ (2008) and most recently in the ‘Independent investigation of the NHS in England’ (2024). Person centred care is not only about listening and responding to patient and service users though. It is also about listening to staff and improving their experience at work.
We already know from the annual NHS staff survey, as well as from our patient experience surveys across cancer, maternity, urgent and emergency care, adult inpatient, children and young people, and community mental health services, what areas staff and patients alike would like to see improved and what matters to them as they receive and deliver care.
With this in mind, Picker would like to see a person centred ten-year plan for the NHS that includes the following:
- Interventions to support ‘waiting well’
- Education for self-management, peer support and personalised care
- Clear communication with patients and service users
- A national centre of excellence on patient experience
- Training for staff on person centred care
- Embracing new technologies
- An updated NHS Constitution, with improved visibility among the public and staff
- Improved staff levels.
We are supportive of the government’s proposed three shifts – from hospital to community, from analogue to digital and from sickness to prevention. However, it must be acknowledged that these have all been proposed and committed to in the past. It is essential, therefore, that these changes are finally realised – in full – to deliver for patients, staff and the public.
Our submission to the government’s Change NHS consultation identifies a number of challenges and enablers to each of these shifts, including redesigning funding flows, building and maintaining strong and collaborative system relationships, meaningful engagement with patients, service users, their families and carers, upskilling staff, and tackling the wider determinants of ill-health. We are clear that not all of this can be achieved by the NHS alone and that cross-governmental collaboration, both nationally and locally, will be essential to realising these ambitions.
In our submission to the consultation, we also highlight the following Picker policy priorities:
- Development of a ‘waiting well’ strategy for patients on waiting lists.
- Establishment of a national centre of excellence for patient experience.
- Investment in digital infrastructure and training for staff.
- Public education on the benefits of data sharing and importance of data security.
You can read the full details in our submission here.
