Reflection in practice: How can patient experience feedback trigger staff reflection in hospital acute care settings?

Patient and staff experiences provide important insights into care quality, but health systems have difficulty using these data to improve care. Little attention has been paid to understanding how patient experience feedback can act as a prompt to reflection in practice in the clinical setting.

We aimed to identify the ways in which different types of patient experience feedback act as a trigger or prompt for engagement in reflection in clinical practice in acute hospital settings and identify important considerations for enhancing the value of patient experience data for reflective learning.

We conducted an ethnographic study in eight acute care units in three NHS hospital trusts in England, including 140 hours of observations and 45 semi-structured interviews with nursing, medical and managerial staff working in acute medical units and intensive care units. The data were analysed thematically.

We distinguished between formal patient experience data sources: data purposively collected and collated to capture the patient experience of care, generally at organizational level, including surveys, complaints and comments; and informal sources of feedback on the patient experience recognized by staff alongside the formal data. We also identified patient narratives as an 'in between' source of data. The impact of different types of patient feedback in triggering reflection primarily depended on the extent to which the feedback was experienced as personally relevant, meaningful and emotionally salient.

Patient experience feedback is multi-faceted, but our study suggests that all types of feedback could be harnessed more effectively to prompt reflection.