At the Patients Association we’re championing patient partnership because we believe when patients work with the health and care system, outcomes for patients are better.

Over the next three years, we want to make patient partnership the normal way patients and health and care professionals work together.

Why we believe partnership is better for patients

1. Quality and outcomes: working in partnership with patients ensures that services meet patients’ needs, and therefore achieve better results for patients
2. Cost-effectiveness: ensuring that services meet patients’ needs minimises money wasted on ineffective services, or on services needed to rectify problems arising from inadequate care and treatment
3. Safety: a system that works with patients will value their input and be responsive to concerns about emerging safety problems; failure to respond to such concerns is consistently a factor in NHS safety scandals, and a major contributor to the NHS’s clinical negligence bill.

We launched our strategy in 2021 and since then have been working to achieve our goal, using our Theory of Change as the roadmap to guide our activity.

For the Patients Association, this is an exciting time as we partner with our members, patients, carers and organisations such as the Rural Health and Care Alliance, of which we’re members, that believe like we do in the need for patients and communities to have an equal role in the design and development of services they rely on to live healthy lives.

Patient partnership week

To celebrate the great work that’s going on in health and social care to embed patient partnership, we’re holding a week of events to celebrate and showcase it. All the events are free to attend and open to everybody. We’re delighted that the Rural Health and Care Alliance will be taking part in the ‘Partnering with patients and communities’ session. We look forward to welcoming members of the Rural Services Network to these events.

Starting on the 28th of November, we will have four webinars:

• Shared decision making – examples of great practice
• Partnering with patients and communities – what’s happening in ICSs
• Patients and industry working together – stories from our projects
• Rachel Power, Chief Executive of the Patients Association, in conversation with Dr Henrietta Hughes, the new Patient Safety Commissioner for England.

We hope the events will provide those attending ideas on how they can work in partnership; whether you’re a patient interested in what partnership means to you or you’re a health or care professional interested in what other people are doing to embed partnership working in their organisation or personal practice.

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