“We welcome the publication of the Minimum Standards for Planned Care Patient Experience.

“These standards should provide patients and carers with greater clarity about the minimum levels of service and information they can expect from the NHS when they need elective care – including when they are on a waiting list. This is important, because poor communication and a lack of clear information can increase anxiety and leave patients feeling disempowered. This, in turn, can contribute to people’s conditions worsening whilst they wait for care.

“While the minimum standards are a positive step forward, their impact will depend on how they are used. Providers must commit to monitoring performance against the standards from the perspective of patients and carers, and must be transparent in reporting on their performance. To show a true commitment to excellence in person centred care, providers should also hold themselves to higher standards that exceed the minimum.

“We have long called for improvements to the experience of waiting for care, including the development of a comprehensive ‘waiting well’ strategy. The minimum standards are a helpful step towards this, but we would like to see them go further. Patients may be confused that the standards do not apply to all NHS services, and variation in how they are measured and assessed may limit how they are used. In future, we would like to see the minimum standards extended to cover all secondary care services, and a systematic, comparable measure of patient experience during waiting periods should be launched to support assessment, transparency, and accountability. We would also like to see the standards develop to become more ambitious – for example, by shortening the time in which patients must be told whether their referral has been accepted.

“As new initiatives are introduced to deliver the Ten Year Plan’s ambition of giving power to patients, it is essential that they reflect how people actually use and experience the health service. The patient’s perspective should be key to understanding the quality of services, including as they move between parts of the health system and as they wait.”