About patient and service user partnership

Partnership means working with you to improve health and social care in Ireland. We partner with patients, service users, families, carers, organisations and communities.

Patient and service user partnership is part of how we plan, deliver, improve, and manage services. This means patient experience influences decisions at every level of the organisation.

We listen to your lived and living experiences. We work with you to shape service design, delivery and to improve decisions for individual care.

Our aim is to improve access to services, improve people's experiences and achieve better outcomes.

Partnership can happen at different levels.

These include:

• care
• service design and delivery
• policy and programme development
• research and innovation
• organisational governance and change

Partnership involves working with different experiences including:

Lived or living

You are an individual with past or current personal experience of using health and social care services as a patient, family member or carer.

Collective

You are an organisation that works with people who have lived or living experience. You represent their views and what matters most to them.

Operational

You are an organisation that delivers health and social care services in partnership with the HSE.

Equity

You are an individual or organisation that can notice barriers to care and support equality, diversity and inclusion.

Why partnership is important

You can help to create safer, better and more person-centred health and social care. Partnership helps build care, trust, fairness and respect.

If you are a partner:

• your care more tailored to your needs and preferences
• communication between you and health and social care staff improves
• self-management improves as you are informed and confident about your care
• you help improve services by sharing your experiences and ideas

Quality and safety are prioritised as we make improvements.

The work we are doing

We are improving patient and service user partnership across the organisation.

We are doing this by helping to set up and support the:

• HSE Partnership Hub
• HSE National and Regional Partnership Panels
• HSE National and Regional Partnership Councils
• HSE National Patient Experience Surveys
• HSE National Partnership Strategy
• HSE Annual Partnership Conference

With the help of our partners and colleagues we:

• provide training and resources for health and social care staff
• create opportunities for you to help improve our services
• support patients to work with senior leaders to shape priorities
• support patient experience and quality improvement
• involve a wider range of people and organisations in partnership
• share good practice across the health service