Does the system put patients first?
recently lost both of my parents in less than three weeks. Both had had long-term illnesses so we’d had lots of experience of the care that the NHS can offer – of the excellent staff that work so ...
Measuring patient involvement is hard, but we must do it
The Department of Health’s Mandate is clear, the objective spelled out in plain language: the NHS must become dramatically better at involving people with long-term conditions in their own healthca...
The importance of patient perspectives in patient safety
Here at the Health Foundation we’ve got two major ambitions for change – making care safer and making care person-centred. These two ambitions coalesce when thinking about how to enhance the role t...
Shifting from counting what is measured to measuring what counts
The health service is awash with data – data about performance, processes, outcomes, staff and patients. There is a centrally dictated requirement to measure certain aspects of care, such as waitin...
When it comes to person-centred care, do we need measurement or feedback? Part 1
The tendency to want to measure things has existed for as long as humans have walked the earth. More specifically, in the case of health and healthcare, recorded efforts to systematically measure c...
When it comes to person-centred care, do we need measurement or feedback? Part 2
Last week I wrote a blog sharing my thoughts on the problematic nature of measuring the person-centredness of our health services. In our collective efforts to improve care quality, we need to be a...
Enabling self-management for patients using vaginal pessaries
This project, led by Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, aimed to test a self-management pathway for women using vaginal pessaries for pelvic organ prolapse. The team worked with a...
Promoting compassionate health care for homeless people
Led by University College London Hospital, working with NHS trusts and homelessness charities, this project aimed to transform interaction between health workers and homeless people in order to pro...
Transforming the culture of mental health services through peer support
Led by the Institute of Mental Health in partnership with Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust and based at the University of Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust, this project aimed...
Acute assessment for children
Aimed to improve the experience of patients arriving at Accident and Emergency (A&E) with abdominal pain, this project focused on reviewing the whole patient pathway from presentation at A&E, to ei...
