Involving patients and the public
At the Healthcare Commission, we believe that the key to improving healthcare lies in focusing on what matters to patients and the public. This page explains how we engage with members of the public so that we can find out their views and experiences of using their local healthcare services.
Key aims
The key aims of our work to engage with patients and the public are:
- Finding out what matters to them and making sure that this influences what we look at in the annual health check of the NHS and in our national reviews and studies of all healthcare services.
- Gathering people's experiences of their local services so that we can feed this information into our assessments and ratings of NHS trusts.
- Evaluating how NHS trusts and independent healthcare organisations engage the local community before they make decisions about their services, and encouraging improvement where necessary.
- Providing information about healthcare services to help patients and the public decide which services they wish to use.
How we find out what the public thinks and what matters to patients
We use a range of methods for engaging service users and the public; we select them carefully to suit our different purposes and to achieve the best possible outcomes. Here are some of the ways that we use to gather the views of patients and members of the public:
- Through the Healthcare Commission's helpline.
- Our national programme of surveys of NHS patients
- Workshops with voluntary organisations that represent patients and the public
- Workshops with patients and members of the public recruited to discuss specific issues
- Invitations to local scrutiny committees, the lay members of the boards of NHS foundation trusts, local safeguarding children boards and the new local involvement networks (LINks), to comment on how well their local trust(s) are meeting core standards
- Getting feedback from our SpeakOut network of community groups that represent people throughout England, who are seldom listened to
- Running focus groups and on-line discussions with our consultative panel of patients, members of the public and healthcare professionals
Getting local feedback on NHS trusts
Our pioneering system of risk-based regulation - the annual health check - is based on large amounts of quantitative data about how NHS trusts are performing. But when we asked members of the public what they thought about our proposals for our new system in 2005, they told us that we should take more account of their experiences as users of the services. This was why local feedback from patients, carers, and other members of the public became an important aspect of our assessment process. Groups that represent patients and the public - such as local involvement networks (LINks), overview and scrutiny committees and lay governors of foundation trusts - play a vital part in providing this information. The most important way they can get involved in the annual health check process is by commenting on their local trust(s) performance against the core standards. They send their comments to the trust, who then include them when they submit their annual declaration of performance.
The link below will take you to the guidance we have produced for these groups, which includes tips for writing comments and the timescale for sending them to the trust.
Working with local Involvement Networks (LINks)
The Government introduced Local Involvement Networks (LINks) in April 2008 to give people a stronger voice in how their local health and social care services are delivered. As well as sending their comments to their local trusts, the organisations that host LINks can also send feedback to us throughout the year via a dedicated Engage website. The link below will take you to the Engage website and our guide for LINks.
Engage website (opens in a new window)
Making sure we listen to everyone
Health services belong to everyone, and we all have a right to voice our opinions about the healthcare we receive. We particularly want to hear from people who belong to minority groups, who are more likely to experience poor health and lower quality healthcare, and whose views may be overlooked. They include certain ethnic groups, people with learning difficulties or physical disabilities, and people living in poverty, including homeless people.
The SpeakOut network
One way that we are using to ensure that we do get the views of vulnerable people and those whose voices are not usually heard is our SpeakOut network of community groups. In order to learn about how people in seldom heard groups experience healthcare, we train the group leaders to listen to and record the experiences of their group members, and to send these to us through the Engage website. We have also worked with an arts group to design more creative ways of gathering ‘stories' from those who find it easier to express themselves through craft or music. We then integrate this feedback with data from other sources that we use when assessing the trusts involved.
Checking how the NHS engages with patients and the public
One of our responsibilities as England's healthcare watchdog is to monitor how well NHS trusts engage with their local communities, particularly when planning or making changes to their services. Under the National Health Services Act 2006 there is a duty on trusts to seek and take into account the views of patients, carers and their local community. One of the standards we assess against checks that trusts are complying with this duty.
National study of how healthcare organisations engage patients and the public
This year we are carrying out a national study to get a clearer picture of how well the health service as a whole engages with patients and the public. We will be looking at the different approaches that health services use, the impact that this work has had on creating more patient-focused healthcare services, what helps or hinders trusts' engagement activities, and how they engage with vulnerable or marginalised groups. The overall aim of our study is to make recommendations for how patient and public involvement should be regulated in both the NHS and independent sectors. We will also be drawing up recommendations for Government, healthcare organisations and the Care Quality Commission on improving practice.
Find out more about out national study of patient and public involvement
How we use the feedback from patients and the public
Find out more about how we use the feedback from patients and the public
Making sure our information is accessible
To make sure that the information we provide is what people want to know and is presented in an accessible way, we test our web and print publications with an external consultative panel. Made up of patients, members of the public, and healthcare professionals, the panel give us valuable feedback and suggestions through facilitated focus groups and online feedback sessions. This feedback has a direct impact on the way present our information, both at the early design stages and on an ongoing basis. We always welcome views, and you can provide us with your own feedback by clicking on the link below.
