Patient Involvement
Patient Involvement
Effective involvement of local people is the best way to ensure that services fully meet patients' needs. By remembering a few key principles, you can build a relationship with the local community that makes your work more effective.
- All service redesign should look at the current patient journey alongside patients. Only by examining people's experiences of services can we identify what works and what doesn't.
- Involvement must be part of the commissioning process from the outset. If patients, carers and the public are not brought in to advise until the later stages of the commissioning process, their views cannot be fully integrated into your work. It is also important to manage expectations and be realistics about what can be achieved and what cannot. If this is agreed at the start of the process, then involvement will be more constructive.
- Involvement must be properly resourced. Without the necessary support, programmes cannot be effective and may not be taken seriously.
- Stability is vital. Committee members and representatives of the public will be most effective if they are consistently involved over a period of time.
- Meaningful PPI will be independent of the commissioning process. The role of patients should not be to rubber stamp decisions that have been taken elsewhere. Participants should be able to challenge, assert and scrutinise. This can be secured by drawing up codes of conduct on both sides.
- Good outcomes should be identified and can be measured.
- There is more to PPI than attending meetings. Look at wider mechanisms to involve patients - local authorities and the voluntary sector can often be very good at this kind of work, and willing to help. Local Involvement Networks (LINks) which will replace PPI Forums may also create innovative ways for you to engage with people.
- PPI should be inclusive. It is very important to get different groups involved, so that input is genuinely representative of the local community. We can only build a complete picture of local services by listening to different people's experiences of them.
- Best practice must be shared. If you have been part of a successful project, tell others! You may be able to help them to do the same, and to avoid problems on the way. This website provides one way of doing this; you can submit your story as a case study or discuss it more informally on our forum.
More information is available from the Department of Health, the NHS Centre for Involvement and the Picker Institute.
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