Creating a patient and customer services revolution

The aim of the ‘creating a patient and customer services revolution’ ambition is to stimulate a revolution in patient and customer experience across the NHS Midlands and East.

The creating a patient revolution ambition aims to ensure that sustainable improvements in patient and customer experience are achieved through working closely with and through organisations across the NHS Midlands and East to support and generate a patient revolution. 

This includes helping to define and share best practice together whilst at the same time introducing a new standardised metric for the monitoring of real-time patient experience data.

From 1 April, as part of the Ambition’s drive to ‘create a customer services culture’, all trusts will deliver the ‘friends and family’ test, where patients admitted to hospitals will be asked a single question to gauge their overall experience. The question is "how likely is it that you would recommend this service to a friend or family?" using an "extremely likely" to "not at all likely" scale.

Recently name checked by No 10, test results from the first few months Friends and Family tests are available now.  There is an FAQ available for a chance to find out more about the tests.  You can also get more information from the Patient Revolution newsletter.

The delivery of the ambition is being driven by three areas of work:

• Creating a Customer Services Culture, exploring how we use the experiences of our patients to improve services through programmes such as patient stories, mystery shoppers and much more.

• Strengthening Community and Citizen Participation, looking at how the patient and public voice is played into decisions about the shape of services, the quality of NHS services and ultimately, with partners, in holding the NHS to account.

• Clinical and Patient Experience includes such areas as empowering patients to be in control of their own care, including shared decision making and the use of technology to personalise care.

The drive to achieve a patient revolution and a focus on customer service is supported by the Policy and Strategy Directorate and a strong team led by Dr Stephen Dunn, with Andrew MacPherson, Kay Fradley and Ruth May as well as members of the nursing directorate, trusts, commissioners, observatories and many others.