I am working in the project planning the 2010 Government design competition in Norway, which will be focused upon healthcare. I am also hungrily looking for references related to user experience. Today I found some really useful documents that show how the NHS in the UK is really beginning to focus upon a patient-led health service.
The first document I found is  a pdf titled: “Now I feel tall - What a patient-led NHS feels like”. (link). This gives a useful overview of the field, argues why improving the emotional experience of patients matters, and the main drivers for improving patients’ emotional experience. The documents makes a nice distinction between feelings during the service journey, and the feelings that result from the experience. This nicely takes into account the research showing what we recall when describing experiences,
The second document I found is called Creating a patient-led NHS (link). This document focuses upon the challenges of implementing a patient-led NHS in terms of strategy and tactics. I found a nice description of a future service vision that was both pragmatic and descriptive at the same time.
Finally, a quite detailed document from the Kings Trust in the UK: Seeing the person in the patient by J. Goodrich (link). This argues for the benefits of patient-centric approach, describes the dimensions of patient-centred care and a framework for the analysis of factors underlying patients’ care. It also includes the following quote from Gilbert 2006 (Â Stumbling on Happiness. New York: Knopf.) regarding who can tell you about the patient experience:
If we want to know how a person feels, we must begin by acknowledging the fact that there is one and only one observer stationed at the critical point of view …she is the only person who has even the slightest chance of describing ‘the view from in here’, which is why her claims serve as the gold standard against which all other measures are measured.
Finally, a practical and pragmatic approach to how to go about designing for the patient experience is the Experience Based Design (EBD) approach, which gives a nice step by step guide to how to design for experiences (link).
I think that the NHS is on a fantastic trajectory, and I really hope that the recent election and power change does not disrupt it.