NHS is the abbreviation for National Health Service, the publicly funded Health Care System for the UK. It is the worlds largest system with 1.4 Million employees! 9% of the GDP go into this system. The system used to be very reactive and did not enjoy the best reputation.

The simple measure of success at that time was: Are you dead or are you still alive :-)

What Andrew MacPherson did is to introduce a monthly pulse survey asking about the overall experience (from getting the appointment, parking the car, treatment until discharge). They started with 46 hospitals that handled 15 Million patients a year.

Biggest challenge when introducing the program was to not leave the organization behind. They only had 8 weeks to design and 12 weeks to implement the whole program. And the goal was definitely that the program was driven by the frontline organization.

Program was called the "Friends & Family Test" as the question asked is: Would you recommend this service experience to your family & friends?

After implementation of the program they got very valuable feedback and were discussing the patient experience on a monthly basis in the board discussions. Something that maybe has happened on a yearly basis before.

In 12 months they surveyed 366.000 patients and had an average response rate of 19%.

Look at the Youtube video to see how this program really made a change: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhsQ99frmM0

Goal is to survey 56 Millions customers / year in 2015. Good luck Andrew in significantly improving the customer experience for all the NHS-patients.