The patient as partner: Can the NHS learn from the high street?

We need to treat patients as partners in a journey rather than cases to be managed, writes Lee Rickles, chief information officer at Humber Teaching Foundation Trust

In my years leading digital transformation within the NHS, I have often reflected on a fundamental friction in our modern world: Why is it that a consumer can track a £10 parcel from a warehouse to their doorstep with GPS precision, yet a patient often feels like they are shouting into a void when navigating their own life-critical care?

When we talk about the ‘patient experience’ we aren’t just talking about clinical outcomes or the successful delivery of a procedure. We’re talking about how a human being feels when they interact with our system.

To understand where we are failing and where we could soar, we must look at the gold standards of the British private sector: the John Lewis Partnership and Virgin.

The contrast: Efficiency vs. empathy

In the retail and travel sectors, the customer is the North Star. At John Lewis, every staff member is a ‘Partner’ —a co-owner with a vested interest in the brand’s reputation.

Their experience is defined by reliability and the ‘never knowingly undersold’ spirit of trust.

If a product fails, the system bends to fix it, often with a level of personal accountability that makes the customer feel valued.

At Virgin, whether in banking or aviation, the experience is about ‘thinking red’—innovation, personality, and making the customer feel seen.

We too often treat patients as cases to be managed through a system, rather than partners in a journey

There is a systemic effort to inject ‘wow’ into the mundane, ensuring that the service feels like it was designed for a person, not a demographic.

In contrast, the NHS patient experience is often defined by ‘the wait’ and ‘the repeat.’

The clinical care, once accessed, is frequently world-class, but the person’s experience—the friction of booking appointments, the repeating of one’s medical history to five different clinicians, and the anxiety of the unknown—is where we lag.

We too often treat patients as cases to be managed through a system, rather than partners in a journey.

The staff experience: The mirror effect

One of the most vital lessons from John Lewis and Virgin is that you cannot provide a five-star patient experience with a one-star staff experience. The customer experience is a direct reflection of the employee experience.

• Ownership and agency: John Lewis Partners feel they own the business. In the NHS, our frontline staff often feel like cogs in a vast, bureaucratic machine, governed by top-down targets rather than the “joy in work” that leads to better care.
• The permission to care: Virgin Atlantic empowers its crew to solve problems on the spot. In the NHS, we have unintentionally created a culture of ‘computer says no’, where rigid silos and a lack of data interoperability prevent staff from being able to give patients the answers they need.

Through my work with the Yorkshire & Humber Care Record, I see this daily.

When a clinician doesn’t have the right data at their fingertips, they are forced to spend their time being a data-entry clerk or a private investigator instead of a healer.

If we want staff to provide a Virgin-standard experience, we must give them the digital tools that remove the administrative burden and allow them to focus on the human in front of them.

What the NHS requires: The development roadmap

To become a world leader in customer experience, the NHS doesn’t need more customer service posters in the hospital corridors. It needs a fundamental shift in how we train, support, and develop our workforce:

1. Digital literacy as a compassion tool: We must train staff to use technology not as a barrier, but as a bridge. Interoperability—the core mission of the Yorkshire & Humber Care Record—is actually a kindness strategy. It ensures the patient doesn’t have to repeat their trauma, and the staff member has the full picture.
2. Psychological safety and empowerment: We need to move away from a blame culture toward a learning culture. Staff should be trained and supported to make decisions that prioritise the person over the process, much like a John Lewis Partner is empowered to ‘make it right’ for a customer.
3. Co-design training: We must stop designing services for patients and start designing them with them. This requires training in user-centred design—a skill common in the tech world but still maturing in clinical leadership.
4. Wellbeing as a metric: We must treat staff burnout with the same urgency as a clinical safety breach. An exhausted, demoralised nurse cannot provide a John Lewis level of personalised care.

The final verdict: Will it ever happen?

Now for the difficult question: Can this ever truly happen within the current construct of the NHS in England?

The honest answer is: Not under the current ‘command and control’ architecture.

The NHS is currently built on a foundation of fragmented trusts, competing priorities, and siloed funding.

John Lewis works because it is a single partnership with a unified purpose and a shared bottom line.

We will only become a world leader in experience when we stop seeing IT, clinical care, and customer service as different departments

The NHS, conversely, is a federation of thousands of independent entities often protected by digital moats. Our current construct rewards activity (seeing a patient) rather than experience (how the patient felt and how well they were supported).

However, I’m an optimist. The shift toward the NHS 10 year health plan provides a glimmer of hope.

This plan signals a move toward three big shifts: hospital to community, analogue to digital, and sickness to prevention.

We are finally moving toward a model where the system is expected to wrap around the person, rather than the person fighting to enter the system.

We will only become a world leader in experience when we stop seeing IT, clinical care, and customer service as different departments.

In a digital age, the experience is the service.

If we can empower our staff with the right data through initiatives like the Yorkshire & Humber Care Record, give them the agency of a John Lewis Partner, and the innovative spirit of a Virgin crew member, we won’t just have a National Health Service; we will have a National Care Service that the world looks to for inspiration.