Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps the Department is taking to ensure consistent and effective communication between hospital doctors, consultants, and the families of patients during inpatient care.

The Government is committed to putting patients first, including ensuring that people have the best possible experience of care. We recognise that poor communication can be a source of frustration and worry for patients and their families, particularly for inpatient care. It is therefore crucial that patients and families receive regular, consistent, and effective updates.

Martha’s Rule is a patient safety initiative to support the early detection of deterioration by ensuring the concerns of patients, families, carers, and staff are listened to and acted upon. It gives patients, their family members, and carers a right to request a rapid review if they’re worried that a patient’s condition is getting worse and their concerns are not being responded to.

Under the NHS Constitution, patients have the right to be involved in decisions about their health and care and must be given the information and support to enable this. Where appropriate this right includes family and carers. Hospitals also have a range of legal and regulatory duties, assured by the Care Quality Commission, to ensure consistent and effective communication, including the Duty of Candour, and the Accessible Information Standard, which requires bodies to identify, share, and meet people’s communication needs, and must adhere to national standards to improve communication within clinical teams.

Additionally, improving perioperative care is a key priority for the Government. Better communication between patients and healthcare teams is a key part of improved perioperative care. To improve and standardise the quality of perioperative services in England, Getting It Right First Time is collaborating with NHS England’s Digital Outpatient, Elective Recovery, and Elective Workforce Recovery teams to form the National Perioperative Care Programme.

The programme recognises that shared decision making, where a clinician collaborates and supports a patient and, if a patient wishes, a carer or someone close to them, to decide their treatment, should be embedded in all perioperative pathways, and should begin at the earliest opportunity when surgery is considered.

It is also recognised that local providers are best placed to decide how to embed and maintain perioperative care approaches into their organisations, to reflect local needs and circumstances.