Partners in Patient Care: Understanding the Patient Journey
Aug 30, 2019
We want to see the NHS be a sustainable health service not just for today but also for future generations. Towards this goal, Novartis engage in partnerships with the NHS to improve healthcare services and, ultimately, improve the standard of patient care.
The NHS faces broad capacity challenges, with many NHS services struggling to see, treat, and care for patients in an appropriate and timely manner. This means that patients could face delays in receiving treatment, and that the treatment they receive may not be in line with latest guidelines.
Novartis and the NHS are collaborating in partnership projects, or joint working projects, that focus on the patient's journey through the current healthcare system, also called the patient pathway. These joint working projects aim to identify any issues and find opportunities to enhance the capacity of NHS services, in turn helping to improve patient experience.
The pathway mapping partnership projects involve a series of interviews and workshops with key stakeholders (such as patient-facing healthcare professionals or NHS managers) designed to understand how patients currently flow through NHS services (e.g. from initial GP visit through to diagnosis and onward treatment, and management by different sections of the healthcare services). The interviews also help to understand how patients actually interact with each component compared with how they are supposed to interact with the service, as defined by local guidelines.
For each pathway, the results are presented as a map showing how the patient pathway is organised in the NHS and how patients flow through it. By visualising a pathway as a map, anomalies, blocks, and opportunities for change can be identified.
Overall, patients will benefit from more efficient pathways, potentially leading to earlier diagnosis and earlier access to treatment, resulting in an improved clinic experience. The NHS will benefit by having an improved understanding of how to overcome the challenges in the patient pathways and how best to allocate resources to enhance both patient experience and outcomes.
By working together, partnerships such as these aim to transform the care given to patients. We share with the NHS the goal of improving treatment pathways and patient care, and firmly believe that greater collaboration with industry can support the NHS in meeting the healthcare challenges of the 21st century.
See how pathway mapping is transforming patient care across the UK in our current joint working projects:
