About

Better Together is Scotland's Patient Experience Programme. It supports NHS Boards, frontline staff and patients in driving forward service improvement.

The programme will also help best practice to be shared between different services and lead to changes at a national level.

What will be covered?

The Programme will initially focus on three areas:

• People receiving hospital care (focused on inpatient)
• People who receive Primary Care (focused on GP Services)
• People with long-term conditions (including cancer)

NHS Boards will continue to develop the use of patient experience into service design and planning across all service areas in order to drive improvement.

Developing ways to collect patient experiences in three areas

Better Together is currently developing ways to collect experiences from people who have been treated as inpatients within NHSScotland and people who use GP services.

Information has been gathered from inpatients and people registered with a GP (during 2009/2010).

Who developed this work?

The Better Together Coordination Centre, in partnership with a range of representatives from NHS Boards, other organisations and patient groups, is developing how we collect patient experiences through a group called Measuring Experience.

All the work which is developed has been piloted and the inpatient survey has been ethically approved through the National Research Ethics Service (NRES). 

Who gathers these experiences?

Each NHS Board is responsible for collecting its patients' experiences. NHS Boards have had the help of an Approved Contractor to send out questionnaires to patients. NHS Boards will also organise focus groups and other forms of feedback gathering.

Will patients have to participate?

Patients will be asked to participate and all involvement in the programme will be entirely voluntary. The information provided by individual patients will be confidential and patients will not be identifiable in the results given back to the NHS Boards.

What will happen to the results?

Once work to collect patients' experiences is complete, results will be published on this website. NHS Boards and GP surgeries will then implement improvement work and share best practice when they have analysed their own information and agreed local improvement plans.

More about us

• Watch the video about the launch of the Better Together patient experience programme
• Download the information leaflet about the Better Together
• Be kept up to date about Better Together by viewing our latest Newsletter

Long Term Conditions Work Stream

The Better Together Long Term Conditions Work Stream will be taken forward by Better Together in partnership with the Long Term Conditions Collaborative and Long Term Conditions Alliance Scotland. The work stream aims to build on the good work already happening. 

As the national GP and In-patient experience surveys will capture information on people’s experience of long term conditions, this work stream will not include a further national data collection exercise.  Instead, a topic report on long term conditions from the data gathered within the national surveys will be produced.

The Better Together Long Term Conditions work stream will contribute to culture change, by building capacity and capability of healthcare staff in gathering and using people’s experience to make improvements. The work stream will aim to embed people’s experiences of living with long term conditions within improvement work, via tests of change. It is anticipated that a Patient Engagement and Patient Experience Toolkit be developed as part of the wider Better Together programme and disseminated widely.  This will collate and build on/sign-post to the approaches already developed nationally, internationally and locally.

Definition of Work Stream

The aim of this work stream is to improve the experience of people living with long term conditions.  This will be achieved through the following objectives:

Objectives:
• To publish and disseminate a National Patient Experience Topic Report on Long Term Conditions
• To build capacity and capability of healthcare staff in gathering and using people’s experience to make improvements.
• To embed people’s experiences of living with long term conditions within improvement work via test projects; and to test patient experience approaches
• To identify tools, approaches and case studies to contribute to an Engagement and Experience Toolkit
• To produce a report which provides an overview of the findings from the above work.

Timescale
June 2010 – March 2011

Steering Group
A Steering Group will be established to oversee this work.