About the Experiences of Care programme
Up until 2025, a large part of our work focused on developing skills in person-centred care methodologies to support quality improvement. Our Experiences of Care programme took a range of forms, from open access courses offering practical skills development, to formal accredited professional qualifications. Our support in this area covered general training for individuals or bespoke training for teams or departments.
On 1st April 2025, we transferred the Experiences of Care programme to Picker Institute Europe, a leading international health charity specialising in the measurement, understanding and improvement of person-centred care.
Our Experiences of Care work was built upon proven methodologies — Experience Based Co-Design (EBCD) and Patient and Family Centred Care (PFCC) — and was supported by a strong faculty with broad experience of patient experience, quality improvement and co-design. We also published a range of toolkits to support others to use the EBCD, PFCC and other methodologies. These can now be accessed on the Picker website.
Our patient experience work was inspired by Keiran Sweeney (1951–2009), a GP and medical scholar who wrote about the need for a compassion-based understanding of medicine. He died of mesothelioma, and during his illness, wrote about his experiences, urgently calling for healthcare staff to improve the relational aspects of their care by considering the patient’s perspective and making changes accordingly.