Reflecting on 2024: a year of growth and impact at Picker
It has been a remarkable year for our team at Picker – one in which we have continued to grow whilst striving to promote the highest quality person centred care for all, always.
Our team is bigger than ever, and in many ways, this has been our busiest year to date. That makes it impossible to list every achievement, which is a shame – there have been so many important milestones and moments to celebrate. Instead, I want to highlight some achievements that show how we have collaborated to produce excellent, impactful work and, together, illustrate the breadth and reach of our efforts.
- An early milestone was the publication of the 2023 NHS Staff Survey in March. The 2023 survey was the largest ever – incredibly, more than 700,000 people responded – and provided powerful insight into workforce experience. This involved huge effort from across Picker: our coordination centre organised and published the survey for NHS England; our national programmes team worked directly with NHS providers up and down the country; our data science team produced amazingly detailed and interactive reports; and our insight specialists worked with trusts to help them turn the survey findings into improvement actions. Truly, a wonderful team effort. We’re also working to further improve our work on the survey – we’ll soon be piloting improvements to on our online dashboard with a small number of trusts ahead of a wider rollout in 2025. Watch this space!
- We have also been busy with national patient survey programmes, including coordinating the NHS Patient Survey Programme for the Care Quality Commission. This year’s programme has been busier than ever, creating challenges both for our coordination centre and national programmes teams. Both teams have responded admirably by juggling responsibilities and managing methodological developments in the surveys. We’ve also been able to accelerate our reporting to trusts on national programmes, which helps improve the utility of survey data – again, this very much a collaborative effort, particularly from our national programmes and data science teams. Meanwhile, as well as national surveys, the coordination centre team have led a pioneering project to explore people’s experiences of pregnancy and baby loss – an important but under studied area that has required sensitive and thoughtful research.
- Away from surveys, our research team have been busy leading large-scale evaluations, including of the Health Foundation’s Q Community. We’ve also continued to collaborate with universities, most notably as a partner in the Quality, Safety, and Outcomes of Health and Social Care Policy Research Unit (QSO PRU). I was delighted to attend the launch event for the second round of QSO PRU, although it was a bittersweet occasion as we mourned the loss of two long-term collaborators: Professors Ray Fitzpatrick and Jules Forder, who each passed away this year.
- Unequivocal and expansive cause for celebration this year came via our national awards events to recognise best practice in patient experience. Our long-term partners at the Patient Experience Network (PEN) officially joined the Picker Group from the 1st April, and we were proud to work closely with new colleagues, including PEN MD Ruth Evans MBE, on this year’s Patient Experience Network National Awards (PENNA). We welcomed more than 300 guests for the in-person event in October – a truly memorable day filled with inspiring examples of commitment, creativity, and care.
- Outside of national programmes and events, our teams continue to provide support and leadership for a range of partners and projects. A great example of that this year is in our work with the Thirlwall Inquiry, for whom we organised a rapid survey of staff views on the culture within neonatal units across England. Our programmes team did a remarkable job of organising this very quickly to provide high-quality insight for an important, high-stakes public inquiry – I’m very proud of their efforts and the impact of this work, which has been cited as evidence in the inquiry.
- Throughout the year we have sought to influence policy makers and providers to focus on improving people’s experiences of care. Ahead of the UK general election we published our own manifesto for a person centred NHS, and in the second half of the year, we have worked with stakeholders to advocate for the use of patient experience information in planning and managing the health service.
That’s probably all I have space for in this blog – a pen portrait of some of our highlights from a packed year. But these are just a few of the things that we’ve been up to: for more examples of our work throughout the year please see our website’s research and insights page; make sure that you’re signed up for our newsletter; and look out for our next annual impact report in the summer. Finally, don’t hesitate to get in touch if you’d like to talk to us about how we can help you or your organisation to understand, measure, or improve people’s experiences of care – we’d love to talk to you!
