NHS England Experience of Care Team are pleased to support Fab Change Week.Fab Change Week is the ideal opportunity for trusts to pledge to find out more about how they can improve the experience of care their patients and service users receive using the Always Events® methodology. Support is available from the Experience of Care Team to help you to do this. Find out more below.
Always Events®, initially conceived in the US by the Picker Institute and now led by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), are defined as “Those aspects of the patients experience that should always occur when patients, service users, their family members and carers, interact with health care professionals and the health care delivery system”.
IHI’s Always Events® Framework provides a strategy to help health care providers, in partnership with patients, service users, families and carers, to identify, develop, and achieve reliability in person- and family-centred care delivery processes. This is achieved by asking “What matters to you?” as well as “What’s the matter?”
A key distinction of an Always Event® is that patients, service users, families and carers, and have identified the event as fundamental to improving the experience of care. A fundamental principle in co-designing Always Events® is to move from “doing for patients” to “doing with patients”.
Backgound NHS England has worked collaboratively with IHI and Picker Institute (Europe) to pilot and test the Always Events® methodology across the NHS in England. The pilot phase of the programme began in February 2015 and ran until April 2016 and engaged ten provider pilot sites across England.
The purpose of the programme was to evaluate the implementation of Always Events® in these locations and assess the impact on improvement of quality in health care settings. A toolkit was developed during this phase, in partnership with the trusts involved. The toolkit is available here.
In 2016 and 2017, a third phase of the Always Events® programme continued to support the ongoing work of the original pilot sites in assisting them to spread the Always Events® methodology throughout their organisation and also to spread the Always Events® framework to additional sites.
Where are we now? We have a number of organisations who are working on co-designing an Always Event® with their patients and families, and are aiming to have 100 by April 2018.
These are in a wide variety of settings including, but not exclusively maternity, acute, mental health, learning disabilities, outpatients, ambulance trusts and others
For additional information, or to find out how you can become involved please contact [email protected].
IHI’s Always Events Framework®
