Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department has taken to (a) measure and (b) improve patient experience and quality of compassionate care.

Feedback on patients’ views on the services they receive is a vital part of the way the National Health Service improves services and delivers improved outcomes for patients.

Patients are offered a range of opportunities to feed back on the quality of the care they receive. These include near real-time feedback such as the Friends and Family Test, which is a survey conducted by NHS service providers to identify good practice and opportunities to make improvements, locally developed feedback programmes, and annual feedback such as national surveys including the Cancer Patient Experience Survey, the GP Patient Survey, published by NHS England, and surveys conducted by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) to assess experiences in specific settings such as inpatient care.

The CQC also inspects against whether services are caring and responsive to people’s needs. Under the ‘caring’ domain the CQC’s inspectors look for evidence that staff involve and treat service-users with compassion, kindness, dignity and respect.