South Tees NHS Trust Patient Involvement

Patient Experience and Involvement Strategy 2023-2026

Working in collaboration with Healthwatch South Tees and our service users we have developed our Patient Experience and Involvement Strategy: ‘Working together will make sure accessible person-centred care is given based on needs and experience’. This strategy covers three years and is aligned to the Trust’s overall vision to ‘deliver the highest standards of patient-centred healthcare.’  Through our mission to put safety and quality first, our vision of empowering our clinicians and our values and behaviours of being respectful, our aim is to work in partnership, provide support and delivery compassion care for our patients, their carers, family and friends.

Patient experience is described as, what the process of receiving care feels like for the patient, their family and carers. Experience is personal and although some experiences are common to many, everyone experiences things differently and each experience itself is made up of a number of experiences, or “moments” (NHS Institute of Improvement and Innovation).

Patient experience is an integral element of quality care, which is well recognised as being care that is delivered in a safe and effective way and where the best possible experience is achieved (NHS England).

A patient’s experience starts from their very first contact with the health and care system, right through to their last contact, which may be years after their first treatment, and can include end-of-life care (NHSI; 2018).  With this in mind, we must ensure that we are getting services right for our patients, even more so as we continue to build partnership working across the developing the Integrated Care System (ICS).

Delivering excellent care requires the experience of our patients to be considered at every opportunity, and must be embedded in the leadership, culture and operational processes of the Trust. Effective leadership is essential, and the Trust will be receptive to supporting a collaborative approach to understanding and learning from patients, collecting feedback from our patients so we can measure and drive quality improvement.