Co-creating patient experience principles at Moorfields Eye Hospital
The challenge
Although Moorfields Eye Hospital’s clinical care was consistently rated ‘excellent’, this did not always translate to an excellent patient experience. The Trust therefore approached New Citizen Project in 2022 to develop a set of ‘customer service principles’, with the aim of improving patient experience.
In early conversations around the brief, we challenged the Moorfields team to think beyond ‘customer service’ and view the challenge in a more holistic way - just as a patient would. This led to a change in the brief from focusing just on ‘customer service’ to the wider patient experience.
Our approach
We used a co-creation methodology to deliver a set of Patient Experience principles which could be rooted in the stories of patients, carers and staff. This would enable the resulting principles to reflect the lived experience of those attending and working at the trust and have greater support and legitimacy.
Our methodology included a series of interviews with senior stakeholders and a review of existing data, before convening a group to participate in a series of co-creation workshops, designed in two stages. The first of these used storytelling to surface the lived experience of patients, carers and staff, before identifying common themes. The second stage involved us using those themes to imagine what improvements and changes could be made, based on those experiences.
Impact and learning
Our work led to the creation of “See the Whole Person”; a set of patient experience principles rooted in the stories and lived experience of everyone working, being treated or supporting someone else at Moorfields. Alongside these principles, we identified three key insights:
There is a clear, reciprocal relationship between patient experience and staff satisfaction.
There is a need for infrastructural efficiency in order for staff to perform at their best.
The small details make a big difference to patients.
These insights, taken together with the See the Whole Person principles, made the case for an important second phase of work - designed to embed the principles by working with staff to make improvements at the trust. Rather than develop a training manual or toolkit to help embed the principles, we proposed equipping and supporting staff to explore the principles in their own day-to-day practice.
Read more about the Action Lab we set up as part of the next phase here.