The Values Based Standard™ of Macmillan Cancer Support: A quality framework for improving both patient and staff experience through co-production

Learning Points

A small amount of example is worth more than a mass of advice, collect stories to win hearts and minds, rather than ‘telling’ people what they should be doing.

1. Use data and ensure you have a robust base-line to work from.  This will be important in demonstrating an improvement has been made.
2. Collect experiences from both patients and staff – this will help provide evidence on where effort should be concentrated
3. In the initial stages ensure front-line staff have the ‘headroom’ and support this will enable them to lead the work
4. Quick wins are important, they do not need a project behind them
5. Ensure leaders are able to make strategic links, i.e. they are able to articulate how implementing the Values Based Standard™ supports and is integral to the organisation’s existing priorities
6. One solution/intervention does not fill all, this methodological approach is a strategy for achieving behavioural change in the eight domain areas set out in the Values Based Standard™
7. Concentration on action not action plans!

A final learning point.  If the interactions between staff and patients are at the heart of providing a good experience for patients and staff, it makes perfect sense that it should be patients and staff who focus on what needs to change to drive improvement.  Experience-based co-design is a vehicle through which the Values Based Standard can move from being paper-based to action oriented. 

Co-production, that is patients and staff working together is vital, because, as humans we don’t’ always do what we think we do, and we don’t always do what we say we do.    In our early work with a very good chemotherapy unit, staff reported that they knew and used every single one of their patients’ names.  The first patient we interviewed remarked ‘this is the first time in my life anyone has ever called me Shirley!  I’ve always been known by my nickname’.