Making Sense of Healthcare Experiences. An Application of Story-Based Medicine Philippa Hunter-Jones, Lynn Sudbury-Riley and Ahmed Al-Abdin, University of Liverpool Management School, UK INTRODUCTION This paper uses a patient centric, storytelling methodology to contribute to our understanding of the patient experience. It is particularly focused upon questioning what data, collected through the medium of stories, tells us about the patient experience of healthcare. The value of listening to service users is pivotal to the Experience Based Design (EBD) movement which recognizes the role all users play in developing user-focused healthcare services (Bate and Robert, 2007). In EBD, as more generally, storytelling is a powerful medium for organizing and communicating experiences to others (Bate and Robert 2006). Stories generated may take many forms (Frank, 1991, 1995). Their application to healthcare contexts is particularly valuable as the discourse generated contributes to the ‘person-centered’ care agenda favored in healthcare delivery (Care Quality Council, 2014). Health has been identified as an essential research priority for the science of service. It is also core to the transformative service research (TSR) agenda (Ostrom et al. 2015). This paper contributes to this research agenda particularly in relation to the service research priorities of: enhancing the service experience; and improving well-being through transformative service. It contributes to our understanding of EBD through listening to the story of one service user as she transitions from curative, to treatable, to palliative and end-of-life care. It is organized as follows. An initial literature review considers the existing approaches to patient experience research. Following a methods section, the story of Ma’am, our central character is detailed. Our discussion examines her story to determine the dominant factors modelling her experiences and how these might be captured in other settings. Conclusions and implications are then presented. LITERATURE REVIEW Patient experience data, often inter-changeably described as patient satisfaction data (Batbaatar et al. 2017), exists at both an individual level and collective level. It is collected through many different mediums such as traditional survey type tools: Hulka Patient Satisfaction with Medical Care Survey; and Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey for instance, along with methods of descriptive feedback: interviews, critical incident techniques, patient narratives and observation for instance. Whilst survey instruments dominate, there is an appetite for, and appreciation of, the role qualitative research methods also play in understanding experiences. Finding ways of effectively deploying such methods, cognizant of their resource implications, is a recurring question (Health Foundation, 2013). Hospital settings are frequently referenced in patient experience research (Mosadeghrad, 2014). Data collected in studies can be differentiated by in-patient and outpatient experiences (Beattie et al. 2014). Primary care has been extensively covered with studies detailed here indicative of the wider field of research. Greco, Brownlea and McGovern, (2001) examined the impacts and implications of different models of systematic patient feedback on the development of General Practitioner (GP) (akin to a Primary Care Physician (PCP)) interpersonal skills. European perspectives are offered by the work of Grol et al. (1990) who identified aspects of general practice that are generally evaluated by patients in a positive way. This included keeping records confidential, GP listening to patients, consultation times and services in case of urgent problems. Where patients struggled to understand organizational aspects scores were higher in fee-for-service systems. brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by University of Liverpool Repository