The NHS 5 Year Strategic Plan

Improving Patient Satisfaction in the NHS

"We are making the shift towards an NHS that puts people first by linking payment to patient satisfaction." 
Andy Burnham, Secretary of State for Health

December 2009 saw the former Secretary of State for Health, Andy Burnham, publish his 5 year strategic plan; NHS 2010-2015: from good to great. preventative, people-centred, productive.

The plan highlights the need to significantly expand the measurement of patient satisfaction and links significant portions of provider income to patient experience. This means, for the first time, connecting the level of patient satisfaction with hospital income. Over time, up to 10% of hospital income could be dependent on patient satisfaction.

CRT supports numerous NHS Trusts to achieve their financial incentives. Our ViewPoint Patient Feedback system enables organisations such as the Whittington Hospital, Central Lancashire PCT and Guy's & St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust to collect and analyse high quality patient feedback. This allows them to meet key goals of the CQUIN Payment Framework.

"Patients find ViewPoint easy to use which allows us to gather feedback from a much wider range of patients than was previously possible". Chris Giles, Development Manager, The Whittington Hospital NHS Trust

Healthcare providers are required to include a wide range of patient satisfaction measures in their Quality Accounts, which will be a legal requirement upon NHS Trusts by summer 2010. Therefore the need to collect patient feedback in real-time via hospitals and community care has become a necessity.

The flexibility of CRT’s ViewPoint system  allows NHS Trusts to capture feedback on a wide range of measures. It facilitates responses from those hard to reach groups in the community, children and the mentally challenged so that Quality Accounts are “a fair and accurate assessment of a Trust’s performance.”

Comments Simon Rowland, CEO of CRT; “The Strategic Plan provides the NHS with real incentives to engage with and understand their patients, leading to service improvements that will release budgets. Measuring general patient satisfaction is no longer enough. The NHS needs to provide real-time multiple channels for patients to provide feedback on a service by service basis.”

CRT will provide you with a range of feedback tools and expertise, empowering you to capture real-time patient opinions. Via powerful reporting and analysis, you will have the ability to drive positive change throughout your organisation. Our innovative solutions allow NHS providers to gain new information from their patients, as well as create new opportunities to communicate and collaborate, in order to meet payment framework requirements.