Our Strategy 2024-2029
We are proud to share our strategy for 2024-2029. Developed collaboratively with our members, our Board and staff team, Lived Experience Partners and key stakeholders across the sector, our strategy seeks to target our efforts and achieve the maximum impact for our communities. Our overall goal is a health and care service that better meets the needs of all people living in England.
Our three key areas of focus
Engagement conducted with our members and key stakeholders helped us develop our three key areas of focus, all of which are interlinked. We know improvements in one area are necessary and helpful to drive improvements in others.
1. End unequal access
A key aspiration for the NHS is that everyone should be able to access high quality treatment and care, in a timely manner and in a way that works for them.
Over the last decade, NHS performance statistics have shown growing issues with access, with our members sharing how these challenges are not felt equally across different geographies and communities.
By addressing the barriers experienced by those facing the worst outcomes, we will find solutions that improve care for all with the intention that in five years’ time our work will have led to significant changes in the way ‘access’ is understood.
As just one example of how this will impact individuals, is that in five years’ time we hope to see the management of elective waiting lists routinely considering social factors alongside clinical need to ensure people get equitable access to treatment and appropriate additional support while waiting. will have led to significant changes in the way ‘access’ is understood.
2. Transfer power to people and communities
National Voices is a leader in co-production, bringing together people with lived experience with policy makers and clinical leaders on a regular basis to drive culture change and ensure policies are reflective of real-life need and experience.
Our strategy sets out how our approach can be used to democratise decision making in health and care, ensuring both patients and the public have their say.
Ultimately, we will use this to demonstrate what a new power sharing model of care between clinicians and those who use the NHS would look like if it was spread through every level of the NHS and social care.
In five years’ time, we expect services and communities to think and behave differently about the role and involvement of patients and the public both in terms of management of their own conditions and how they can meaningfully shape the services they use.
3. Shift the measures of success
Currently, the NHS is primarily judged on process measures and volumes of activity, such as the number of hip replacement surgeries as an example, with media and political narratives almost entirely focused on key performance indicators (KPIs) such as the size of the elective backlog.
Current KPIs reflect only a very narrow part of the care pathway. Rather than assessing the outcomes and experiences of care, and do not account for the experiences of patients nor whether the services are providing care that meets people’s needs.
Only by embedding patient experience in the way NHS measures success can the NHS shift its culture to one that puts patient needs at the centre of the care it delivers. We will seek to shift the culture by growing the use of our ‘I Statements’ as a basis for understanding what matters most to people.
In five years’ time, we hope our strategy enables the NHS and social care to use additional performance metrics that value and prioritise patient experience.
Implementing our strategy
We know our coalition cannot make these fundamental and vital changes happen on our own, and we are committed to collaborating with system partners to drive change together. But where progress stalls and inequalities persist, we will not be afraid to speak out.
We want to make patient experiences, outcomes and driving down inequalities the core measures of success for services, so that systems challenge themselves to do better in these crucial areas.
Read our strategy
Our strategy is available to read in the following formats:
This page was last reviewed in September 2024.