It’s a year since we first started talking to NHS organisations about our ‘customer care in the NHS’ package of research. And I can now tell you that we’ve successfully delivered our very first piece of customer care work – to NHS Sefton.

With customer care being a topic of discussion amongst the team for the best part of 12 months it’s been great to see the interest from multiple sources on our visits to NHS Trusts across the country. The philosophy of our customer care research package is to drive understanding of customers through better patient experience, increase good word of mouth, protect market share against competing Trusts and ultimately increase the quality of experience for patients. 

We believe that basing quality in the NHS around patients is starting to make a difference in the service. The movement away from the needs of staff to the needs of patients can drive improvement and competition over patients can make this connection even stronger.

After a year of discussing how competition and markets can put the patient experience at the heart of the quality agenda, I was astonished to read Secretary of State Andy Burnham’s statement this week that the NHS will be the provider of choice where its services are of a high enough quality. This statement retracts years of Labour NHS policy and reverses the policy of improvement through market forces that the NHS is adapting to. Commissioners throughout the country will despair at the announcement, which suggests a return to the NHS commissioning itself rather than looking to a plurality of options for delivering care. Competition over customers really feels like the light at the end of the tunnel for NHS organisations and retracting that could be damaging to the development of better management and addressing the needs of the most important people of all – the patients.

More astonishing is the timing of the announcement. With the end of the Labour government almost certainly a mere six months away, the statement is likely to be retracted by David Cameron’s Conservatives and is clearly rooted in an election run-up political stance to protect ‘our NHS’ against the evil private sector.

One thing’s for sure: a return to a non-competitive monolithic NHS that commissions only itself will not drive quality and improvement.