Patient partnership in quality improvement involves patients and caregivers in deciding what should change, designing the change, and judging whether it is useful. It goes beyond asking for satisfaction scores after staff have already chosen the problem and solution.
Patients experience parts of the care process that a nursing team may not see: finding the service, using instructions at home, managing an unclear handoff, or explaining the same information repeatedly. Their experience can change the project's definition of success.
Give partners a meaningful role
AHRQ's hospital engagement guide includes patients and family members serving as advisors, alongside communication, bedside handoffs, and discharge planning. Advisory work is one practical route for partnership in improvement; participation in one's own care and participation in organizational design are related but different activities.
For a project, explain the question, what decisions remain open, and how the patient's contribution will be used. Agree on expectations, meeting arrangements, support, and any confidentiality requirements. Use the organization's process for compensation or reimbursement where available rather than expecting participation to be effortless.
A single partner should not be asked to speak for every patient. Consider whose experiences are missing and how to seek them, including people who have difficulty attending meetings or using the usual feedback channels.
Share enough information to participate
Provide plain-language descriptions of the process and proposed measures. Explain terms that staff use casually, such as an eligible encounter or a completed referral. Invite partners to question whether those definitions match their experience.
IHI recommends involving the people affected when selecting measures and using qualitative as well as quantitative information. A patient may identify that a process counted as complete still leaves them unable to take the next step.
Do not require personal disclosure as the price of participation. Use anonymized process examples and approved ways to handle sensitive material. Partners should be able to contribute ideas without repeatedly recounting distressing experiences.
Illustrative change in the project question
An illustrative outpatient team initially plans to improve the readability of appointment instructions. Patient partners explain that the main difficulty is knowing which entrance to use and whom to contact when arriving late.
The team revises the project to test the whole arrival instruction, including the practical information patients need. The example shows how partnership can redirect design; it does not claim that a particular revision improved attendance or patient outcomes.
Show what happened to the input
After meetings or testing, explain which suggestions were adopted, which were not, and why. Give partners a chance to review the revised process and the interpretation of results.
Evaluate the partnership itself: Were participants able to contribute? Did their input influence decisions? Were meeting times, language, technology, or jargon barriers? Counting advisory meetings alone cannot answer those questions.
Patient partnership is most credible when it changes how the team learns and decides. The nursing contribution includes making clinical constraints understandable while remaining willing to reconsider assumptions about what patients need.
When people disagree about the aim, start with patients’ goals in care planning.
Related
Equity in Quality Improvement Measurement
Writing a Quality Improvement Aim Statement
Sources
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AHRQ: Guide to Patient and Family Engagement in Hospital Quality and Safety (accessed 2026-09-17).
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IHI: Establishing Measures (accessed 2026-09-17).