Hospital Pathways Programme

In brief

Our Hospital Pathways programme will demonstrate how the health service can achieve its aim of putting the patient at the centre of everything we do.

It is run in partnership with The King’s Fund as part of its Point of Care programme, and works with patients, families, healthcare staff and hospital boards to improve the patient experience.

The programme aims to achieve a breakthrough in patient and family experience in two care pathways within each of the participating hospital trusts. The approach will focus on developing patient-centred care alongside strong staff engagement. This relates directly to the Health Foundation’s wider aim of transforming the relationship between people who use health services and those who provide them. 

In practical terms, this means working with five hospital trusts to develop a small number of ‘exemplar’ hospitals and a group of professional staff and managers who can demonstrate how they have improved patient focus and staff engagement, and then share their expertise.

The programme gives participating hospitals a unique opportunity to use techniques which are not yet widely used in the NHS to improve both processes of care and staff-patient interactions. It is believed that together these will have a profound effect on how patients and staff experience health care.

The hospitals' perspective

The participating hospitals will work to:

• understand the drivers for quality of care. This will include what ‘quality’ means to patients
• transform the care of patients in the two care pathways so that it is reliably excellent in terms of safety, clinical effectiveness, patient focus, timeliness and efficiency, as assessed by patients themselves
• build capability, so that lessons from this work can be sustained and spread across a whole hospital
• improve staff engagement and wellbeing, helping in turn to focus the attention of staff on the patients’ experience.

The patients' perspective

From the patient’s point of view, the programme aims to make sure they:

• feel confident that the care they will receive will always be excellent, both clinically and in their own assessment
• participate in their own care at a level they feel confident with, by collaborating with health care professionals
• feel that their care has been designed in a way that acknowledges its place within their broader lives.

The programme has now engaged five hospital trusts and established a governance structure. In addition a faculty has been established, as well as a number of expert groups addressing the key themes of the programme. 

The faculty consists of four experts who have been commissioned to engage with the participating hospitals to develop their work on the programme. Meanwhile, each expert group looks at broader themes, such as leadership and values, staff effectiveness and wellbeing, or patient-centred care, among others.