If you understand what people need and want, you can plan to deliver quality care that is accessible and avoids the common pitfalls of poor patient experience. By involving groups of local patients or local patient representatives, you can explore their experiences, seek their help in designing services that really work, and join forces to come up with real solutions to everyday problems.
I want to have these user groups involved in commissioning as we’re a three way team, I have expertise in commissioning, the consultants are clinical experts and the users expert in their condition –– we have an equal and valid role to play in making decisions about what we’re going to do.
Carol Cottingham, NHS Lincolnshire Head of Long Team Conditions
Commissioners are now commissioning along care pathways rather than looking at a particular service area – so you cannot commission care effectively without involvement – without involving everyone who has a role in that care plan. You need to look the experience of key stakeholders involved in that journey.
Adrian Mayers, NHS Hammersmith and Fulham Head of Long Term Conditions Commissioning
People who use services often have very clear ideas about what could help them, and the aspects of care that could be improved. They can also provide commissioners and managers with a valuable reality check from the front line at each stage of the commissioning cycle.
They (the user representatives on the Network Board) actually posed the questions to health professionals that the health professionals wouldn’t ask…one of them asked, ‘How do you know whether the model of care/pathway is working properly?’. So one of the GPs said, ‘Well do you know what, we don’t, and what we need to do, is we need to make sure that we’re collecting the right things and… if it’s not going in the right direction then the model/pathway has to change’. So they were able to articulate their concerns in the meeting and at one stage have one of the consultants from the acute trust agreeing with everything they were saying… It was worth everything that we have done so far in the project…
Jacqueline Rooney, North Mersey Diabetes Network Manager
Brian Cranny (North Mersey diabetes user group) explains why user involvement is important: