Who we are

Picker is an international charity working across health and social care. Established in the US in 1986 and UK in 2000, our work is at the forefront of understanding and furthering the link between patient experience, person centred care, and clinical excellence.

We use people’s experiences of healthcare to identify priorities in delivering the highest quality care, working across health and social care.

Our approach is about understanding the things that matter most to people about care. Our ‘Picker Principles of Person Centred Care’ are an internationally renowned quality improvement framework that underpin measurement of high quality person centred care. The Principles articulate our belief that everybody deserves timely access to safe, high quality care that addresses their own individual preferences and needs.

Whether it’s designing and delivering the first national NHS patient experience survey in England, co-ordinating the largest staff survey in Europe, pioneering innovative improvement interventions such as Always Events®, or working with individual providers and healthcare commissioners to improve service delivery, we are committed to sharing our knowledge and expertise, alongside developing new services and tools that enable people’s experiences to be an integral part of delivering the highest quality person centred care for all, always.

We’re continuously looking for new ways to understand, measure and improve the quality of health and social care.

About the Picker Group

The Picker Group consists of Picker Institute Europe (our charitable organisation, trading as Picker) and Picker HWA – the latter following our purchase of Howard Warwick Associates. Picker HWA has diversified our portfolio to include care homes and private providers.