27 February 2025

Share for Better Care Week: the importance of patient experience

This Share for Better Care Week, National Voices’ Chief Executive, Jacob Lant, explores why hearing from patients is so crucial in developing a full picture of health and care services.

Share for Better Care
Health inequalities
Lived experience
Person-centred care

Our support of the Share for Better Care campaign

It is a fundamental belief of ours at National Voices that health and care services, and health and care policy, work better when they are designed with people with lived experience of health conditions, Disabled people and people experiencing health inequalities. Only by listening to the voices and experiences of people can we truly understand what is working well, what needs to be improved, and design and develop services that work well for everyone.

This is why we are proud to support the Share for Better Care campaign, run jointly by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) and Healthwatch England. The campaign encourages everyone to share their experiences of health and care services to help drive improvements and has engaged with a range of excellent partners including National Voices to help ensure this includes the people we need to hear from most.

Public feedback can play a vital role in helping health and social care services identify ways to better support people, this could be by ensuring services are more accessible, or that the right equipment is available for individual needs. The blog I wrote last year with Chris Dzikiti, Interim Chief Inspector of Healthcare at CQC explores in more detail how CQC are using people’s experiences to improve care.

The Share for Better Care campaign is especially focused on hearing from people who are more likely to experience poorer care and inequalities. In addition to supporting the campaign via social media, we have also been speaking to members about how best the campaign can reach the people and communities they serve, and sharing their insights with CQC. We have also held a similar conversation with our Lived Experience Partners.

In our conversations surrounding how best to reach people experiencing health inequalities with this campaign, just some of the topics we discussed were the use of language, in particular the importance of using plain language, and the importance of things like descriptive text (or ALT text) when it comes to social media posting. We also had more specific conversations about some of the common experiences and barriers faced by individuals when it comes to accessing health and care services.

We would like to thank our members, and Lived Experience Partners for these conversations and for helping this important activity to better reach those who stand to benefit most by sharing their experiences.

This week (24 February – 2 March) marks the first Share for Better Care Week, an awareness week for the Share for Better Care campaign, encouraging everyone to turn everyday moments into opportunities for change by sharing their experiences of health and social care.

Visit CQC’s website to find out more about the awareness week and how to spread the word. You can also see our social media posts via Bluesky and LinkedIn.

Shifting the measures of success

Our organisational strategy, published in September 2024, identifies three key areas of focus at National Voices, all of which are informed by engagement conducted with our members and key stakeholders. One of the three main areas of focus has been identified as shifting the measures of success.

Where currently, the performance of the NHS is judged on process measures on volumes of activity, such as the number of specific surgeries performed, or the size of the elective backlog, we believe this only tells part of the story.

While these current KPIs are important to record and report, as nobody wants to wait a long time to receive care, they only reflect a very narrow part of the care pathway and do not account for the experiences of patients or whether services are providing care that meets people’s needs. They won’t tell you, for example, whether somebody was happy with the care they received, if they got questions about their health answered, or if their communication needs were met.

If we can report on patient experience and patient outcomes, and hold these to the same high regard as traditional KPIs, this will help decisionmakers and patients alike to get a full picture of how well these services are meeting people’s needs. Not only this, but by embedding patient experience in success measures, services will ensure these targets are met, thus helping to improve things for everyone.

Share for Better Care allows people to feedback on the things that matter to them, big or small, positive or negative. These things may otherwise go unsaid, or unrecognised, and this is why this campaign is so important. By ensuring the campaign hears from everyone, especially those at the sharpest end of health inequalities, this will help to foster a fuller understanding of what is going well and what isn’t, and improve health and care services for everyone.