Better understanding of patient experience
| Quote 1 | “It has helped to keep the clinicians grounded, it has helped to keep the focus on patient experience”. (RCP12) |
| Quote 2 | “I am very much of the opinion that individual patients cannot represent patients as a whole unless it is very strange or peculiar circumstances. Probably, leaders of some patient organisation or something but even then it is a pretty poor sample”. (PR5) |
| Quote 3 | “There is still quite a lot of uncertainty about what your (PPI representative) role is. Are you giving a viewpoint as a patient who has experienced that service, so if you like common sense from an individual point of view or are you in a representative role are you trying to reflect a broader view of patients let's say who are acutely ill going in through a particular hospital. And, that I think hasn’t been worked out nationally we haven’t really got a sort of sense of what the, what the major aspects of a patient representative role are”. (RCP12) |
| Quote 4 | “I think that the disappointing thing is that one considers patient experience, to be reflected by a patient representative. Because patient experience is so much more than just one person coming in and saying… I think the word representative is a very difficult word because I am not sure that (our patient representative) could truly represent patients other than having been one… we have 70 000 patients a year, so the question in my mind is, you know if we are trying to extrapolate a representation of their experience, then having one person who has their own carried experience representing them is difficult”. (DS3) |
| Quote 5 | “If you have a patient representative the… are they a representative of the wider population or are they just bringing their own baggage to it, that is a big question and it is a big, you almost have to train people not to bring their baggage to the table and that is not easy”. (RCP4) |
| Quote 6 | “Patients will speak more openly with us (PPI representatives) than perhaps they feel they can do with the medical or other members of the team”. (PR2) and without their input, “I don’t believe their true voice would have been heard. And so some assumptions would have been made as to what the patient needs”. (PR2) |