comment: Patients must learn to care about the quality of the healthcare they receive

Published: 08/04/2004, Volume II4, No.5900 Page 15

There are two ways to read this week's piece by Mori social research director Ben Page (Ideas, pages 16-19). One is with a shrug of the shoulders and a 'told you so' snort that says, of course patients do not care about the arcane intricacies of mortality ratios and the quality of care as measured by star-ratings and waiting-list targets.

The other way to respond is to ask what the NHS can do to make patients care.

It is surely inappropriate - perhaps even morally indefensible - that a patient should undertake to experience something as important as healthcare with little idea of the risks they run or even a general idea of the quality of care they can expect to receive.

Would any reader of HSJ, for example, happily forgo their knowledge of their local healthcare providers when they, a relative or friend needed help?

Only when members of the public truly understand and appreciate what constitutes quality healthcare will they be able to exercise real influence over its development. Meeting this challenge is the job of the Healthcare Commission, but it also falls to each individual trust to develop a dialogue with its community to improve understanding.

The other lesson to be learned from Mori's work is that patient experience must play a greater part in how the NHS judges itself. The fact that local government's comprehensive performance assessment ratings 'correlate reasonably well' to the public's views of their council shows that it can be done.

Measuring in this way will bring home the importance of staff attitude and the issues of morale and motivation which underpin it. This is arguably the most significant factor in determining patient experience and a reminder to hard-pressed managers that issues such as Agenda for Change have implications far beyond the size of an NHS employee's pay packet. l