This month’s roundup reflects a continued shift in how care is being delivered and experienced, with momentum building around models that move beyond traditional hospital settings and place greater emphasis on coordination, communication and continuity.
Across different systems, we are seeing care increasingly delivered closer to home, whether through hospital-at-home models, home-based treatment, or more integrated palliative care. Alongside this, there is growing attention on how digital tools can support clearer communication and more confident decision-making, particularly where patients are navigating complex or ongoing care.
What stands out is that many of the most meaningful improvements are not driven by large-scale transformation, but by targeted changes in how care is organised and experienced, from how information is shared, to how environments are designed, to how staff are supported to lead improvement.
At the same time, wider developments in the sector continue to highlight some of the underlying challenges. Despite rapid growth in digital and AI-enabled solutions, access, coordination and administrative complexity remain persistent barriers for many patients. There is also continued recognition of the pressure on staff, and the impact this has on experience, reinforcing the importance of leadership, culture and workforce support.
Taken together, the examples in this month’s issue point to a consistent theme: improving experience is less about introducing entirely new systems, and more about making existing care work better for the people who both use and deliver it.
It is all of these kinds of changes, both big and small, that we look to celebrate at the Picker Experience Network Awards every year, and our big news this month is that we are now open for submissions for 2026! Read more below to find out about this year's categories, and how to enter.
As always we love any feedback,
The PEN Team
CASE STUDY
For this month's Case Study, we thought we would share the work of University College Hospitals London NHS Trust and their award winning work with staff.
High Quality Care for Patients through Exceptional Care for Staff: UCLH Staff Engagement and Wellbeing Success Story was the Staff Engagement and Improving Staff Experience 2025 category winner at last year's PEN Awards.
Some dates for your diary coming up that you may want to make a note of:
April 2026
7th April – World Health Day
2nd April – World Autism Awareness Day
27th April – 1 May – Patient Experience Week
28th April – World Day for Safety and Health at Work
May 2026
5th May – International Day of the Midwife
12th May – International Nurses Day
18th–24th May – Mental Health Awareness Week (UK)
31st May – World No Tobacco Day
June 2026
7th June – National Cancer Survivors Day
8th–14th June – Carers Week (UK)
14th June – World Blood Donor Day
15th June – World Elder Abuse Awareness Day
19th June – World Sickle Cell Day
PICKER EXPERIENCE NETWORK AWARDS 2026
The Picker Experience Network Awards are the first and only awards programme to recognise best practice in patient experience across all facets of health and social care in the UK and beyond.
They celebrate projects, teams, individuals, and initiatives that have made exceptional contributions to care, engagement, service delivery, and wellbeing from the perspective of patients, carers, families, and staff.
DON’T FORGET!! It is Patient Experience Week in April (27th April – Friday 1st May) and we have a range of resources and ideas for how to bring this to life at your organisation.
Please get in touch if you’d like to discuss how we can support you – or to let us know about the amazing things you are planning 😊 We’d love to put the spotlight on your Patient Experience Week Activities.
We are running a series of webinars as part of this week – we have two already available:
Unlocking funding for patient experience improvement
Best practice from the Picker Experience Network Awards
Don't worry if you missed them, you can watch them back here:
We are also preparing a toolkit following the Unlocking Funding webinar to provide ideas and tips about preparing for grants for other funding routes. This will be available in Patient Experience Week.
We have three more webinars planned – please see below for further details and to book your free places.
Patient Involvement & Partnership for Patient Safety Healthcare Conferences UK
17th April VIRTUAL, ONLINE
This conference focuses on patient involvement and partnership for patient safety including implementing the New National Framework for involving patients in patient safety, and the role of the Patient Safety Partner (PSP) in your organisation or service. The conference will also cover engagement of patients and families in their own safety, and patient involvement under the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework.
Newsletter subscribers can get a 20% discount with codehcuk20pi
Chief Nursing Officers: Empowering the workforce to deliver exceptional patient experience Picker 22nd April, 12:00 - 13:30
FREE, VIRTUAL, ONLINE
This inaugural CNO Round Table, built around the four DAISY Lifetime Achievement Award shortlist, will focus on a key leadership question: How do Chief Nurses empower, enable and equip their workforce to deliver exceptional patient experience - culturally, emotionally and practically?
The session explores the cultural, behavioural and structural conditions that allow staff to feel confident, skilled, supported and proud to deliver person-centred care.
By the end of the session, attendees will:
- Understand leadership practices that empower staff to deliver exceptional experience.
- Gain insight into cultural and behavioural enablers of person-centred care.
- Learn about replicable approaches such as shared governance.
- Access high-value PX Week resources and leadership reflections.
International Best Practice from the Picker Experience Network Awards Picker 6th May, 12:00 - 13:30
FREE, VIRTUAL, ONLINE
Each year, the Picker Experience Network Awards spotlight patient experience initiatives that have not only improved care, but reshaped cultures, strengthened partnerships, and delivered measurable results for patients and staff.
Rather than focusing solely on what makes an award winner stand out, this session will explore what we can learn from one another across borders. By bringing together the overall winner and shortlisted finalists, we will look beyond geography to uncover the shared barriers, common ambitions, and familiar constraints that shape patient experience work in every system.
Different countries. Different structures. Strikingly similar challenges.
By the end of the session, participants will:
Recognise the common challenges and enablers that shape patient experience improvement across different national and organisational contexts.
Hear directly from teams who have implemented high impact interventions in diverse health systems.
Identify transferable practices, tools, and approaches that can be adapted across countries and cultures.
Understand how collaboration and shared learning can accelerate progress beyond local boundaries.
This is an opportunity not only to see what “great” looks like, but to discover how much we share and how much stronger our work becomes when learning flows across borders.
How to prepare a successful entry for the Picker Experience Network Awards 2026 Picker 13th May, 12:00 - 13:30
FREE, VIRTUAL, ONLINE
The Picker Experience Network (PEN) Awards recognise best practice in patient experience across all areas of health and social care in the UK. The aim of the awards is to improve patient and staff experience by sharing and celebrating best practice. With 20 categories this year, there is an opportunity for a diverse range of teams to showcase their work.
In this webinar, we discuss what makes a successful entry. Our panellists, consisting of judges and previous winners, share how to use the judging criteria to create an impressive case study from your work and top tips on how to ensure you effectively demonstrate the impact of your work on patient and staff experience.
Measuring, Understanding and Acting on Patient Experience Insight: From Insight to Improvement Healthcare Conferences UK
21st May VIRTUAL, ONLINE
The 10 Year plan for health highlights the importance of the effective use of patient feedback putting patient experience as a key determinant of quality and performance. This timely conference will focus on measuring, understanding and acting on real time patient experience insight, and demonstrating responsiveness to that insight to ensure patient feedback is translated into quality improvement and assurance. Through national updates and case study presentations the conference will support you to measure, monitor and improve patient experience in your service, and ensure that insight leads to improvement.
Newsletter subscribers can get a 20% discount with codehcuk20pi
Experience-Based Co-Design (EBCD) helps create lasting improvements in the experience of care by turning patient, carer and staff experiences into joint priorities in the design process.
Our Learning and Development programme worked with more than 300 people last year to deliver EBCD training, both to individuals through our open courses and with organisations such as NICE, Queen Victoria Hospital, and Northumbria University.
With the new financial year fast approaching, the team have a number of opportunities for EBCD training during 2026/27. Training takes place over one day in person, or spread across four 2-hour sessions online. Learning is backed up with Toolkits, coaching and expert support for your research or improvement initiatives, and free membership of our community of practice.
We are playing a key role not only in measuring and understanding patient experience, but in providing the training and tools to improve practice and transform experiences, creating truly person-centred care.
To find out more about what we offer, click here or email the team for an informal chat.
PATIENT EXPERIENCE BOOK CLUB
Time to Care
by Dr Robin Youngson
While talking with a colleague recently, our Founder Ruth was reminded of a book she has both read and loves, Time to Care by Dr Robin Youngson. Amazon helpfully reminded Ruth that she purchased this book back in 2012 – and it has been a regular go to over the years and still packed full of relevance, so this month our recommendation is this.
In today’s beleaguered healthcare system, burdened with epidemic levels of stress, depression and burnout, TIME to CARE offers health professionals the opportunity of renewal. Here are the secrets to building a happy and fulfilling practice, wellbeing and resilience.
Youngson bravely relates his own transition, from a detached clinician to a champion for humane whole-patient care; at times poignant, sometimes funny but always brutally honest. Also a great read for patients and other colleagues.
We also spotted last month that a previous Book Club Recommendation, 'When Your Neurons Dance: The Story of a Doctor with Parkinson's Disease by Jonny Acheson, is now available as an audio book.
Support with promoting the Under 16 Cancer Patient Experience Survey during fieldwork
The Under 16 Cancer Patient Experience Survey(U16 CPES) measures experiences of tumour and cancer care for children across England. Patients with a confirmed cancer or tumour diagnosis, aged under 16 at their time of discharge, who received inpatient or day case care from an NHS Principal Treatment Centre (PTC) in 2025, will be invited to take part in the survey from mid-April 2026.
The team would be very grateful if you could help to raise awareness of the survey with your contacts and communities to encourage as many people as possible to complete and return the survey, if they are sent the survey in the post.
Please use the communications resourcesto encourage patients to complete the survey. These include a detailed communications toolkit, suggested messaging, posters, social cards, videos and infographics that you can use in your own communications.
Support with promoting the National Cancer Patient Experience Survey during the sampling period
The National Cancer Patient Experience Survey (NCPES) will be running again later this year. All adult (aged 16 and over) NHS patients, with a primary diagnosis of cancer, discharged from an NHS trust after an inpatient episode or day case attendance for cancer related treatment in the months of April, May and June will be sent the survey in November.
The team would be very grateful if you could share the information in this communications toolkitwith relevant contacts to raise awareness of the survey with patients receiving treatment between April and June 2026. There are different resources available including template messaging, posters and videos to promote the survey.
Look out for the following survey result publications which are due out this year.
(All dates are provisional.)
2025 CQC Community mental health survey – 31 March 2026
2025 CQC Maternity Survey qualitative thematic report – April 2026
2026 GP Patient Survey – July 2026
2025 National Cancer Patient Experience Survey – July 2026
2025 CQC Adult Inpatients Survey – August 2026
2025 Under 16 Cancer Patient Experience Survey – October 2026
2026 CQC Urgent and Emergency Care Survey – November 2026
2026 CQC Maternity Survey – November 2026
2025 National Neonatal Care Experience Survey - Autumn 2026
Patient Experience Library
Bearing in mind the focus in many of the recent news and articles in the newsletter about bringing care closer to home, this resource spotlighted by the Patient Experience Library is a relevant and interesting read. Inappropriate out of area placements can have severe consequences for patients, carers and the wider system. This report highlights that impact, presents ways of responding to the challenge and provides examples of positive practice.
Launch of new strategy to strengthen healthcare investigation capability
HSSIB have launched their new strategy ‘Building Investigation Excellence’ to help meet the demands of a changing patient safety landscape.
The strategy will be instrumental in supporting investigators across the NHS to carry out high-quality investigations that drive real improvements in patient safety. It is built on extensive engagement with over 250 people and organisations, who delivered clear messages: make support more practical and hands on, target it strategically where capability gaps are greatest, maintain accessible resources for all, and work in partnership.
They outline in their strategy how they will focus on their unique value – their deep investigation expertise, building on their role as a centre of excellence for healthcare safety investigation. This means they will work through four integrated methods.
Targeted capability building where need is greatest.
Accessible resources available to all.
Professional leadership for the investigation community.
National system convening to coordinate efforts and reduce duplication.
They will provide updates on implementation and welcome ongoing feedback from colleagues across healthcare.
PATIENT EXPERIENCE NEWS
Care closer to home
Home-based chemotherapy shows promise for patient experience A clinical trial is exploring the delivery of chemotherapy in patients’ homes, with early findings suggesting improved comfort, reduced disruption to daily life, and a more positive overall experience. It highlights how delivering care in familiar surroundings can support both wellbeing and engagement.
Hospital-at-home models continue to expand In the US, providers are continuing to scale hospital-at-home services, combining remote monitoring with in-person support. These models are reporting high levels of patient satisfaction alongside safe clinical outcomes, reinforcing the potential of care delivered beyond traditional hospital settings. Click here to read more.
Specialist palliative care improves experience and reduces hospital use A recent modelling study shows that specialist palliative care, delivered both in hospital and at home, improves patient experience while also reducing hospital bed days and overall costs. It demonstrates how coordinated, person-centred care can benefit both patients and systems. Click here to read more.
Digital and technology
New telehealth tool supports clearer patient communication In Australia, a new digital tool enables clinicians and patients to co-create and share consultation summaries, improving understanding, recall and shared decision-making. It reflects the growing importance of clarity and partnership in care interactions. Click here to read more.
Virtual reality improves understanding and reduces anxiety Using virtual reality to explain procedures has been shown to improve patient understanding, reduce anxiety and increase satisfaction. It highlights the role of innovative communication approaches in shaping experience. Click here to read more.
“Smart rooms” aim to enhance whole-person care New “smart room” designs integrate digital tools and personalised environments to improve comfort, engagement and coordination. The approach reflects a broader shift toward more responsive and patient-centred care environments. Click here to read more.
Workforce and culture
Staff-led innovation programmes improving experience A staff innovation “Bears Den” programme is enabling frontline teams to develop and implement ideas that improve patient care and experience. It demonstrates the value of empowering staff to lead change. Click here to read more.
Leader rounding strengthens connection and trust Leader rounding — where senior leaders regularly engage with patients and staff — continues to improve both experience and staff engagement, reinforcing the importance of visible, relational leadership. Click here to read more.
RESOURCE LIBRARY
Supporting Happy, Healthy and Productive Teams, One Year of Discovery Northumbria Healthcare NHS FT
Staff Engagement and Improving Staff Experience - Finalist PEN 2019
Supporting Every Smile: Improving the patient journey for children and young people with additional needs or neurodivergent conditions at Leeds Dental Institute
Healthwatch’s new national report focuses explicitly on what care feels like, not just how it performs, calling for stronger action on public insight as the system evolves. The real takeaway: experience data is now being positioned as essential evidence for redesign, not a “nice to have”.
The Patients Association continues to scale its experience survey work to influence policy and system change. The shift here is subtle but important: patient voice is being positioned earlier in decision‑making, not just used to validate decisions already made.
The Welsh Government recently launched their latest guide;
Listening to PeopleThe NHS Wales Complaints, Incidents and Redress Process - Guidance for Organisations 2026 and it was great to see reference to a previous PEN Case Study in there from the Northern Devon Healthcare NHS Trust.
%20(3).png?upscale=true&width=420&upscale=true&name=Patient%20Experience%20Radio%20-%20Templates%20(LinkedIn%20Post)%20(3).png)
