Patient experience interview with Gwilym Morris
Why have TCC developed a new patient experience service?
TCC has a great track record of capturing the experience of citizens across local and national government, the third sector and the NHS. Our new service is simply a more focused approach at solving some of the problems NHS trusts face in capturing patient experience. It is a honed response to a need that has been expressed by our existing clients and a need which we have sensed in the market.
So is patient experience a new avenue for you?
I’d been talking to Jonathan and David (TCC founders) about patient experience for a while before I became actively involved in the company. From the beginning we were on the same page with regards to our core beliefs - that people had to be at the heart of how public services should be developed over the next decade. They then asked me to put my money where my mouth was and develop a new service based on our shared values. My background is in the disability sector, where I spent a great deal of time looking at how health and social care systems could be made more responsive to the needs of the people receiving them. The work I did with organisations such as the Care Standards Improvement Partnership, Disability Rights Commission and the Commission for Social Inclusion all pointed to the fact that we needed ways of capturing the experiences of those using public services in order to improve them. Some organisations do this well at a strategic level through consultation and stakeholder engagement, but we wanted to take it a step further and engage people as they actually used the services.
Is patient experience the answer?
I find it hard to believe that a business would not want as much information as possible to develop and refine the services and products they offer. Every time you enter a supermarket or shop online, systems are in place to ensure that your experiences are collected and mapped.
As public services and the NHS try to improve services in the face of ever tightening budgets, it becomes even more important to understand how people are experiencing a service. This goes way beyond just basic satisfaction and probes into understanding how someone’s underlying history, behaviour and values affect their experience of health-care. A good example of this is how a young disabled person and an older person may respond to care provided in the community. Obviously this is a simplified generalisation for illustrative purposes; but it is likely that both will experience this very differently. The younger person might have a more positive view because they have more control; whereas the older person may feel that they have had a reduction in the quality of service because they are not treated in a traditional hospital setting. Understanding the difference in these experiences is paramount to delivering a good service.
So what’s going to happen next?
We are going to continue to talk to partners in the NHS and elsewhere to move this forward. TCC already has some great services in this area but we want to push this further. We want to create an ecosystem of ideas and enthusiasm for ensuring that patient experience can continue helping support the NHS through the upheaval that it may well be about to face. It’s an exciting time to be working within this sector and I feel that TCC is more than adequately equipped to deal with any changes that may be taking place in the near future.