Seeing the whole patient journey, not four separate ones
A holistic discovery across onboarding, inpatient care, discharge and ongoing care for Priory Group, surfacing where staff perception and patient reality diverged, and where care felt like it stopped too soon.
The Challenge
Priory Group's patient experience was understood in parts. Onboarding was owned by one team, inpatient care by clinical staff, discharge by another function again, and what happened afterwards was, for the most part, not tracked at all. Each stage had its own view of what was working. Nobody had the whole picture.
That mattered because patients don't experience a service in stages. They experience one continuous journey, and the points where ownership changed hands inside the organisation were exactly where the experience was most likely to break down without anyone noticing.
The brief: build a single, honest view of the patient experience end to end, grounded in what patients, families and colleagues actually said, not what each team assumed was happening in the stages either side of their own.
The Approach
We ran a discovery that deliberately crossed the internal boundaries the organisation was structured around, engaging internal stakeholders, directors and colleagues alongside patients directly, to build one shared map of the journey rather than four separate ones.
At each stage we spoke directly with patients about what they had experienced, and with the colleagues and directors responsible for delivering it. Where those two accounts lined up, that was useful confirmation. Where they didn't, that gap became the most important material in the discovery. It's the same pattern we've found holds across sectors: the delta between what an organisation believes is happening and what the people receiving the service say is happening is rarely a footnote. It's usually the finding.
What the delta looked like in practice
Onboarding surfaced specific, fixable friction: points where the process asked more of patients and families than it needed to, at exactly the moment they were least equipped to deal with it.
The more significant gap sat later in the journey. Internally, discharge was treated as the natural end point of the service. For patients and their families, it was where the experience they cared about most was only just beginning.
Patients and family members consistently wanted far greater input into post discharge rehabilitation and ongoing care planning. Internally, discharge read as a handover. For the people living it, care that stopped at the hospital door didn't feel like care that had finished; it felt like care that had been withdrawn at the point it mattered most.
What Changed
- An improved onboarding experience, addressing the specific friction points patients and families described at first contact and admission.
- A clear, evidenced case for greater patient and family involvement in planning post discharge rehabilitation and ongoing care, replacing assumption with what patients had actually told us they wanted.
- A single end to end view of the journey that the organisation could act on as one picture, rather than four separate, disconnected ones owned by different teams.
Key Learnings
- The gap between staff perception and patient reality is not a sign of a badly run service. It's what happens whenever a journey is delivered by teams who each only see their own stage of it.
- Discharge is an internal milestone, not an experiential one. Patients and families keep needing support well beyond it, and services designed as if the relationship ends at the door will consistently under deliver on the phase that matters most to the people living it.
- Speaking to patients and staff about the same moments in the journey, side by side, surfaces things that speaking to either group alone does not.
What We Delivered
- End-to-end discovery spanning onboarding, inpatient care, discharge and ongoing care
- Structured engagement with internal stakeholders, directors and colleagues
- Direct patient and family engagement across all four journey stages
- Delta analysis showing where staff perception and patient reality diverged
- A single, holistic journey map replacing four fragmented internal views
- Prioritised recommendations, including improved onboarding and greater patient/family involvement in post discharge care planning
Only seeing one stage of your journey?
If different teams each own a piece of the experience and nobody owns the whole thing, a focused discovery can build that single view. Quickly, and grounded in what the people living it actually say.
Prefer email? contact@dualperspective.co.uk