NHS England August 2015
- There is no single model for patient leadership and organisations will have different approaches. Findings suggest that when NHS organisations want to involve patient leaders as partners or enhance existing activity, ensuring these conditions are in place and supporting these 10 building blocks, will increase their chances of success.
- 10 building blocks for developing patient leadership:
- Invest in Patient Leaders
- 1. Make patient leaders an integral part of formal and informal decision-making
- 2. Get patient leaders involved in the experience of care, shaping, co-designing and leading proposals from the earliest stage
- 3. Ensure systems invest in tailored, task-specific training and development of patient leaders
- 4. Devote time, resources and effort to building strong and meaningful relationships of respect and trust with patient leaders
- 5. Ensure that patient leaders can easily access what matters to local people as feedback that is robust, evidence-based and easy to understand and use
- 6. Listen to patients whose voices are traditionally not heard, using a range of media and working closely with organisations that have existing links with these communities
- Put robust feedback mechanisms in place so that organisations listen
- 7. Place equal emphasis on making sense of and responding to the qualitative feedback from stories as on the quantitative evidence from numbers
- 8. Systematically log feedback AND report back (close the loop) on what has changed as a result of feedback
- Develop the culture and systems to act on feedback
