Working with us > Understanding Experiences
All experiences matter
Our team of experienced health services researchers provide opportunities for patients and staff to engage freely about their experiences of care, so that they can share, in their own words, what matters most to them, no matter how difficult or sensitive the topic may be.
The insight we gain from these interactions is reflected in our care quality questionnaires, toolkits, reports, guides and learning materials to:
- Increase understanding of different people’s needs and experiences of care
- Promote and share learning from staff delivering excellent patient care
- Enable and support behavioural change to improve the quality of health & social care
We work closely with organisations seeking to understand and represent the experiences of specific care services or hard-to-reach groups. This element of our work is tailored to your requirements and each project is dealt with as an individual opportunity to help improve care quality and patient satisfaction, supported by a dedicated team who ensure the right approach is taken.
If you are interested in finding out more about patient engagement, experience & satisfaction of care please contact us using the Talk to us link below.
Qualitative Research in Healthcare
Understanding and listening to patients’ experiences, whilst supporting them to tell us which aspects of care really matter most to them, develops a rich picture of specific care experiences. We conduct in-depth patient interviews, surveys, focus groups and collect patient stories to explore and understand people’s experiences of living with long-term conditions and of using specific healthcare services.
Accessing experiences of hard to reach groups
We identify and develop the most appropriate healthcare research methods to capture the experiences of hard to reach and vulnerable groups. This ensures that people are able to feedback about their experiences in a manner suitable to their needs and abilities, to help shape and improve health & social care services.
Questionnaire Design
Picker recognises that any new Patient Reported Experience Measure (PREM) must:
- be developed with the target patient population to ensure that it is relevant to their healthcare needs and experiences
- consider the method of obtaining feedback i.e. how will people be given the opportunity to complete a survey and will it be suitable for their ability
- be robust by ensuring that is thoroughly tested with the target patient group
- yield actionable data to identify both positive and negative aspects of care to help drive quality improvement.
Our thorough patient & staff survey development model ensures that the above criteria are met so that survey data reflects accurate and relevant experiences. It involves the following stages:
- Literature Review
- Qualitative Scoping
- Survey Design
- Stakeholder Consultation
- Cognitive Testing
- Pilot
The survey content is based upon what the target group find most important about their care. Stakeholders are consulted in the development process, and the questions are tested for comprehension with the target group. A full pilot ensures that the selected data collection method yields an acceptable response rate and meaningful data.
Questionnaire Reviews
We critically review and improve existing questionnaires for organisations and services. We work with clients to identify the purpose and desired outcomes of a staff and patient engagement survey to ensure that it measures what it intends. We then test the questions, checking for comprehension and that the tool is appropriate and relevant for the target group.
Explore our services
We develop and run surveys and feedback programmes across of health and social care. Click on the different care areas to view the services we offer.
View all surveysCreate your programme
Effective user experience programmes go further than just collecting data. Explore these sections to find out more about the different stages involved.
Case Study: Improving quality one service at a time: Using people’s experiences to improve community healthcare services
Community Healthcare encompasses a huge variety of services. Securing robust, reliable, and representative data to understand and measure patient and service users’ experiences in this setting can become highly complex.
When care services range from district nursing to palliative care and offender health, an intimate knowledge of how to access and measure each group’s experiences is required, particularly as so many of these patient groups are hard to reach. The Health Experiences team at Picker are dedicated to this task, focusing on developing the knowledge and tools required to understand and measure people’s experiences regardless of their care needs or setting.
During 2013 Central London Community Healthcare NHS Trust (CLCH) the largest community healthcare organisation in London, approached us to design and deliver an effective patient experience feedback programme.
“Using the best methods and available technology across professional and patient communities is what Picker do best”
Ian McDowell, Head of PPE, CLCH 2013
The aim:
CLCH provide community healthcare services in four London boroughs across 64 different service delivery units, seeing more than 150,000 people each year in over 160 sites.
Their community healthcare includes an extremely wide-ranging array of services, from paediatric wards to offender health units, from podiatry practises to sexual health clinics.
The aim was to use a range of patient-friendly approaches to enable CLCH to collect high-quality patient experience data across their organisation, supporting staff to act on the intelligence gained to improve care quality.
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