Improving patient experience in the NHS

Patient experience can't be the be-all and end-all of NHS care. After all, doctors have always been easily able to please patients with quackery.

However, medicine has tended to be more doctor-centred than it should be, so an emphasis on patient experience may help to right the balance. An editorial in the BMJ discusses the use of patient experience within pay for performance (P4P) programmes. This sounds as though it has more merit that service-line reporting and management (SLM) promoted by Monitor, although the way SLM has been implemented locally where I live in Norwich has focused on the patient experience (see Monitor example of SLM implementation).

Don't say you feel let down by inpatient psychiatric care

If you do say you feel let down by psychiatric inpatient care, you might incur the wrath of Louis Appleby, the Mental Health Tsar. Thank goodness the Care Quality Commission (CQC) is independent of government, because Appleby thinks they've "deliberately distorted" the results of a survey of mental health acute inpatients (see Community Care news). At least Kay Sheldon, one of the CQC Board, who has herself been detained under the Mental Health Act and received a payout from the NHS for wrongful diagnosis of schizophrenia, has answered him (see blog).