Exploring how to improve patients' experience in hospital at both national and local levels

At The King's Fund's Point of Care programme, we wanted to discover which types of intervention were most likely to achieve positive results and why. Where should staff and hospital senior leaders with an interest in improving patients' experience focus their effort? Should it be on the front line, with staff in direct contact with patients? On the board, with the non-executive and executive directors? Or in the middle, with matrons and business managers? Who is best placed to lead the improvement efforts and what support do these people need in order to be effective? Before we could answer these questions, we needed to frame the factors that shaped patients' experience in hospital and to review the lessons learnt from the limited research available on interventions designed to improve patients' experiences.