Treating Every Patient Complaint as Insight with Claire Marshall of Improving Experiences Ltd
Disruptive Innovators: Champions of Digital Business - CIO & IT Leader Interviews, Digital Transformation, Digital InnovationShow Notes
Most patient experience data never becomes learning. It gets collected, filed, and forgotten, instead of turned into the improvement it was meant to drive. Claire Marshall, Founder of Improving Experiences Ltd, spent three decades inside the NHS closing that gap, and argues most organizations already have everything they need. They just aren't using it.
Claire reflects on three decades in the NHS working to improve how patients, families, and unpaid carers experience care. She argues that most organisations already have the data they need to improve; they just aren’t turning it into meaningful insight. She also discusses her new venture, redesigning care pathways around the people who use them, why bringing lived experience into decision-making can change outcomes, and what she hopes will shift in patient experience over the coming years.
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
00:00 The question every care pathway should start with. 08:55 Three decades of NHS clinical work and the mindset shift that changes how care is designed. 11:10 Why patients often open up differently to volunteers. 16:39 What daily ED walks taught a chief executive about listening. 18:35 Rethinking who really holds expertise in healthcare. 20:59 The NHS policy that pays people for sharing lived experience. 24:40 Turning collected data into practical, organisation-wide improvement. 29:51 The patient-waiting experience is finally getting policy attention. 31:26 The US-UK blind spot hiding in patient correspondence. 33:04 What complaint data revealed about a surprisingly simple source of frustration.
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RESOURCES MENTIONED
Improving Experiences Ltd, Claire’s consultancy helping organisations embed experience as a core strategic driver of improvement and culture: Improving Experiences Ltd does not currently have a dedicated public website. Because it is a newly launched startup, professional updates, announcements, and direct contact options are managed through Claire Marshall's LinkedIn Profile [https://www.linkedin.com/in/claire-marshall-783467b/] rather than an official web portal.
“Return on Human Experience”, Jason Wolf and Stacy Palmer's Beryl Institute book on eight principles for experience excellence in healthcare, which Claire calls the best she's read on the topic: https://theberylinstitute.org/return-on-human-experience/
NHS England, the organisation where Claire led the National Always Events Programme, a quality improvement initiative focused on ensuring key aspects of patient care: https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/minimum-standards-planned-patient-care/ https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/quality-strategy-for-nhs-funded-care-in-england/
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