Experience of care

The experience that a person has of their care, treatment and support is one of the three parts of good care, alongside being kept safe. ‘Experience’ can be understood as what the person experiences when they receive care or treatment and how that made them feel.

When planning for the delivery of the best possible experience across a health and care system or within a provider such as a hospital or GP practice, there are three key principles that should always be considered:

1. Improvements should always be co-produced with people who use services

  • Co-production starts with understanding what matters most to people who use and work in services.

2. Using feedback from people who use services

  • Listening to people’s experiences of care and the views of staff are important in improving services.

3. Improving the experience of care is in all work plans

  • Making sure NHS plans aim to improve experience of care, tackle health inequalities, improve staff experience and support unpaid carers.

National work programmes

We work with teams to make sure everyone’s voices can make services better.

The areas of work we support are:

1 Delivering NHS Long Term Plan commitments to improve carer experience

  • Our Commitment to carers is about giving carers the recognition and support they need to provide good care for loved ones. 

2 Making sure improving experience of care is in priority clinical improvement programmes

3 Support widespread coproduction of improvement in experience of care in quality improvement

  • Always events is a quality improvement way of working that uses co-production.
  • We have been working with Picker Institute and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement to help staff use always events in NHS services.
  • The Experience of Care team now has a number of lived experience partners working in the team to make sure all improvements are co-produced with people with people who use NHS services.

4 Support NHS providers and integrated care systems (ICSs) to improve experience of care

  • The Patient experience improvement framework is a tool that gives hospitals a way to assess the way they work in relation to experience of care. The tool is based on Care Quality Commission reports and themes from hospitals rated as adequate and outstanding.
  • The Heads of Patient Experience (HOPE) Network is a group of people who are heads of patient experience and they help each other with new ideas and ways of working.
  • We are helping ICS’s to co-produce improvements across their area.

Supporting areas of work

Find out more about how we collect feedback, including our national surveys. To help you collect and use feedback in local services, please read these helpful guides:

Here are links to some useful information from other teams at NHS England

Who to contact?

If you would like to get in touch with the Experience of Care team, please email england.peadmin@nhs.net