We’re starting the year with a focus on what actually shifts patient experience in practice; reducing anxiety, making services easier to navigate, and turning feedback and insight into action rather than reports that sit on shelves. This edition brings together NHS examples and international learning, chosen for their usefulness, and practicality.
You’ll also find a spotlight on our recent event in Kuwait, reflections from our book club pick Kinder Conversations, and our usual round-up of news and updates. As always, we’ve been selective: fewer stories, more impact.
We hope this gives you practical prompts for the year ahead - grounded in lived experience, realistic about constraints, and focused on change that sticks.
Finally, we're delighted to announce our timeline and key dates for the Picker Experience Network Awards 2026.
Weds 18th March – All submissions open
Sun 28th June – Submissions close
Weds 29th July – Shortlisted finalists announced
Thursday 1st Oct – Live event in Birmingham
Pop them in your diary and stay tuned for more updates coming soon!
All the best, The PEN Team
PICKER NEWS
State of Person Centred Care 2025 - Report
A new Picker report brings together, for the first time, findings from nine national NHS patient and staff surveys commissioned by CQC and NHS England, mapping them against the eight Picker Principles of Person Centred Care. Set against the government’s Ten Year Plan for Health, it highlights broadly positive perceptions of care quality alongside persistent challenges in areas such as waiting times, continuity of care, mental health, maternity and urgent care.
Throughout, it points to practical examples of what works, drawing on winners and runners up from the Picker Experience Network (PEN) Awards 2025 to show how engagement and co-production can turn insight into improvement.
On 20 January, healthcare leaders and experience professionals gathered in Kuwait for XE-Live: The Patient Pulse Edition, a regional forum focused on moving beyond traditional satisfaction measures towards experience-led care. The event brought together local and international perspectives to explore how insight, human-centred thinking and data can be used to strengthen person-centred care in practice.
Picker played a central role across the day, helping frame the distinction between satisfaction as a score and experience as something lived, observed and shaped across the journey. Contributors shared practical examples of how early signals - emotional cues, patterns in behaviour, moments of uncertainty - often matter more than retrospective ratings when it comes to preventing harm and building trust.
Picker’s Chief Operating Officer, Phil Stylianides, opened the event with a keynote on moving beyond simple metrics towards insight-driven improvement, and helped lead interactive discussions on where organisations should focus their efforts to make experience visible and actionable. Ruth Evans MBE, Founder of the Picker Experience Network, shared practical insight on designing compassionate, insight-led experience, and joined discussions exploring what excellence looks like in real-world practice.
A key theme throughout the day was the importance of recognition and celebration. The discussion highlighted how acknowledging teams for compassionate, person-centred practice is not a “nice to have”, but a critical way of reinforcing the behaviours that lead to better experiences, particularly in complex, high-pressure systems.
The session also used Picker’s Experience Maturity Assessment (PEMA) framework as a structured way to support honest conversations in the room. Rather than benchmarking for its own sake, the framework helped participants reflect on where insight is currently under-used, where responsibility sits, and where small shifts in focus could unlock meaningful improvement. It provided a shared language for discussion, grounding ambition in reality.
The overall tone was practical and reflective, with strong appetite across the region for approaches that connect insight, culture and action — and that treat patient experience not as an outcome to report, but as a capability to build.
Some dates for your diary coming up that you may want to make a note of:
February 2026
Heart Month (UK) - All month
4th February - World Cancer Day
5th February - Time to Talk Day (UK), mental health and open conversations
28th February - Rare Disease Day
March 2026
12th March - World Kidney Day
16th - 22nd March - Neurodiversity Celebration Week
21st March - World Down Syndrome Day
24th March - World Tuberculosis (TB) Day
PATIENT EXPERIENCE WEEK
Patient Experience Week is an opportunity to celebrate the people who have positive impact on the patient experience.
In 2026, Patient Experience Week is Mon 27th April – Friday 1st May.
From early February, we’ll be releasing a refreshed suite of free Patient Experience Week resources, including recognition certificates, posters, social media graphics and practical Learning and Development toolkits, designed to recognise and support teams delivering great patient experience every day.
Over the coming weeks and in the lead-up to Patient Experience Week 2026, we’ll also be hosting a series of webinars, including:
• 17th March, 12:30pm, a session on unlocking funding for patient experience improvement • 26th March, 12:00, a best practice webinar from the Picker Experience Network Awards 2025
• 22nd April, 12:00pm, a Chief Nursing Officer roundtable on empowering the workforce • 6th May, 12:00 case studies on international patient experience improvement
Patient Experience Week is a wonderful opportunity to celebrate progress, be inspired by best practice, gain practical tools, and connect with a national and international community, all grounded in evidence and insight.
Are you working to improve patient experience or care quality?
Join our one-day Experience Based Co-Design (EBCD) and you'll leave with a clear, practical method and tools to co-design meaningful improvements with patients and service users. Our EBCD courses offer structured training in person centred service design techniques and quality improvement. It is open to anyone with an interest in co-design, patient involvement, clinical and non-clinical staff and researchers.
Take the same CPD-accredited course online over four weekly sessions from 5th March. All participants receive free membership to the global EBCD community of practice.
In-house programmes - Training and support tailored to your team
We run tailored programmes to meet your organisation's learning needs. Training is online, in person, or blended, and participants have access to a personalised resource hub, with the option of coaching support beyond the programme.
If you're looking to build knowledge and skills in patient experience, co-design and co-production, person centred care, measuring for improvement, leading for experience, and more - we'd love to help.
Exploring the findings from Picker's 'State of Person Centred Care 2025' report 12th February 2026, 11:00 - 12:00
VIRTUAL-ONLINE
Picker published its first 'State of Person Centred Care' report on 29th January 2026, which brings together the findings from the nine national experience surveys we are commissioned to deliver on behalf of the Care Quality Commission (CQC) and NHS England and mapped them against our eight Principles of Person Centred Care.
Our report also includes examples of existing best practice and a set of recommendations to strengthen patient voice in the NHS of today and tomorrow.
This webinar will explore the report and its findings in more detail, with presentations from members of the Picker team, and an opportunity for audience questions.
If you have questions about this webinar, please email publicaffairs@pickereurope.ac.uk
Public Policy Projects - Patient Safety Forum 25th February 2026, London
IN-PERSON
Picker Institute CEO, Chris Graham will be joining this event, which brings system leaders together to explore safety culture, learning and improvement.
Topics for discussion:
Current and future opportunities to leverage technology and data to improve patient and staff safety
The delivery of safer care to improve patient outcomes and efficiency - what is the role of technology within this?
Optimising the patient safety benefits and minimising the risks of AI in healthcare
The development of digital clinical safety in the NHS – delivering standards and mitigating patient safety risks
Leveraging innovation to improve medicines safety
Patient, family and carer engagement; why not listening is a huge patient safety concern and how to improve patient-provider interaction
Safety management system approaches and organisational patient safety improvement planning
Why leadership and culture matter for patient safety
PSIRF and LFPSE progress; are we actioning learning to improve patient safety?
NHS Complaints Summit: Improving Complaints Handling through the NHS Complaints Standards 26th February 2026
VIRTUAL, ONLINE
This National Virtual Summit focuses on supporting staff to deliver good complaint handling and implementing and monitoring adherence to the PHSO National NHS Complaint Standards which are now being used and embedded across the NHS. Through national updates, practical case studies and in depth expert sessions the conference aims to improve the effectiveness of complaints handling within your service, and ensure that complaints are welcomed and lead to change and improvements in patient care.
Newsletter subscribers can get a 20% discount with code hcuk20pi
Confident and Effective Management of Unreasonable Behaviour and Vexatious Complaints 3rd March 2026
VIRTUAL, ONLINE
Recent years have seen a seismic shift in patient expectations and how consumers across society express their concerns, and this is a highly interactive and effective workshop, to improve confidence and consistency in handling vexatious complaints.
With multi-faceted challenges across healthcare, team can feel that patient behaviours have become more challenging. During this masterclass, delegates will explore the current reality, consider our perceptions of the patient/healthcare provider interaction and then develop confidence and strategies & practical tips through case studies to ensure our skills and approach to communication can be further honed, developed or adapted.
Newsletter subscribers can get a 20% discount with code hcuk20pi
Kinder Conversations: Talk it Out, Without Falling Out
by Tim Keogh
Our next book club read focuses on something deceptively simple: how we speak to each other when things are hard.
Kinder Conversations explores how small shifts in language, tone and intent can change the quality of everyday interactions – with colleagues, patients and partners alike.
This isn’t about being “nice”. It’s about being clear, human and constructive, especially in moments of pressure or disagreement. Expect practical reflections rather than theory, and plenty of relevance for anyone working in complex systems where relationships matter.
Reducing anxiety and effort for patients and families
Designing away anxiety before care begins Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust has expanded Europe’s largest 360° virtual hospital tour, helping children and families familiarise themselves with clinical spaces before appointments, a simple, NHS-led intervention to reduce anxiety and improve experience. Click here to read more.
What patients value in everyday medical devices A new report from National Voices highlights what matters most to patients using medical devices outside hospital settings, including comfort, ease of use and impact on daily life, with implications for commissioning and design. Click here to read more.
Closing the feedback loop at scale (international) The US Defense Health Agency has launched a standardised Patient Advocate Assistance Reporting Tool to capture, track and resolve patient concerns consistently, a useful example of operationalising patient voice in large systems.
Transparency as a lever for improvement Oceans Healthcare has chosen to publicly share its safety and patient experience data, arguing that openness can accelerate improvement and accountability rather than increase reputational risk.
Giving clinicians time back to care Ardent Health reports early benefits from using ambient AI documentation tools to reduce administrative burden, freeing clinicians to spend more time with patients, while raising important questions about consent and governance.
Patient experience remains a system priority In case you missed it, NHS England’s latest performance reporting reinforces patient experience as a core dimension of quality, alongside access, safety and outcomes, as services continue to evolve.
At The Countess of Chester Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, Rosie and Jim, have been bringing joy and comfort to patients and staff alike. The duo has become a regular, lifting spirits on wards and offering moments of calm and connection for people facing stressful hospital stays. Their visits are part of a growing recognition that animal therapy can contribute to wellbeing and experience, helping patients feel less isolated and more supported during their care journey.
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