Get ready for Experience of Care Week

Experience of Care Week is coming around again and runs from 22 to 26 April.  You can find out how to take part and download resources on the dedicated web pages.

This international campaign is again being supported by both NHS England and NHS Improvement and offers everyone the opportunity to celebrate the work that’s happening to improve experience of care.  This will be our third year of involvement and will build on the success of the last two years, as well as reaching out further to external partners.

We are inviting teams across the system, in commissioning organisations and care providers, to get involved and share their work in a variety of ways, such as events, blogs and other social media activity during the week. The aim is to inspire and encourage others with examples of small and big things that are improving experiences for the people using and working in our services. 

Find out more on the WeCommunities web pages where you can download a range of colourful, fun graphics to help promote the week.

Get involved, make some noise and let’s turn the spotlight onto experience of care.

Social media is a key tool for bring this Experience of Care Week to life, so please use the hashtag #ExpofCare to join the conversation and share photographs to tell everyone what’s going on in your part of the NHS.

Funding available for informatics in health care research.

The Health Foundation, an independent charity committed to bringing about better health and health care for people in the UK have opened their £1.6m Insight Research Programme 2019 for applications. This is a researcher-led open call supporting original research on informatics in health and care services. We are inviting outline proposals for research that advances the collection and use of data within national clinical audits and patient registries to improve health care quality in the UK. We are looking to support up to five projects with funding between £300,000 and £400,000.

Find out more: www.health.org.uk/insight2019

This programme is open for application until 16 May 2019

Latest news from the Friends and Family Test development project

The work to inform revised guidance on the Friends and Family Test was recently completed after extensive engagement with more than 1300 stakeholders – healthcare professionals, FFT suppliers and patients – to identify ways to make it a stronger tool to support local service improvement and to increase the FFT’s accessibility to all services users.

The final phase was formal research and cognitive testing of some possible options by Ipsos MORI, and the findings have now been delivered.  Their independent report on this work is expected to be published in April.

Conclusions and recommendations from the nine-month-long FFT Development Project are being considered by NHS England’s Chief Executive, Simon Stevens, and he will decide whether a sufficiently strong case has been made for changing the current FFT requirements.  Once a decision has been made, we will be writing formally to trusts, to CCGs and to primary care professional bodies to let them know.  We will also update our project web page.   We still aim to produce revised guidance by the end of April.