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Improve outcomes and experiences with EBD

Experience Based Design (EBD) is a proven approach to service improvement. It helps healthcare organisations understand what care really feels like for patients, service users, carers and staff, and use that insight to design better services together.

At NHS Elect, we provide end-to-end EBD support, combining practical expertise with our bespoke EBD app to help healthcare organisations improve patient outcomes, enhance experience, and strengthen collaboration across teams and systems.

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What is EBD?

EBD is a collaborative improvement approach that brings together patients, service users, carers and staff as equal partners in designing services.

Rather than starting with assumptions or solutions, EBD starts by listening, capturing real experiences, and understanding how care is experienced at key touchpoints across a pathway or service. Those insights are then used to co-design improvements, ensuring that changes reflect what truly matters to those involved.

EBD is particularly powerful because it combines:

  • Qualitative insight with improvement methodology

  • Emotional experience with operational understanding

  • Collaboration with practical action

You can find out more about how EBD can improve services by watching the video opposite.

We offer three complementary ways to support organisations to use EBD effectively across services, teams and improvement programmes.

End-to-end EBD delivery

We provide support across the full EBD journey. This includes designing the right approach to capturing experience, delivering data collection with patients, service users and staff, and analysing insight to identify clear priorities for improvement. We then support co-design, implementation and follow-up, so insight leads to action and meaningful change.

Our innovative EBD app

We have designed and built our own EBD app to make capturing experience easier and more scalable. Organisations can access the app so patients and service users share their thoughts via a phone or iPad, using questionnaires tailored to services or pathways. The app provides clear insight through automated reporting and can be delivered by us or used independently by your teams.

Training and capability building

We offer training in the EBD methodology to help teams build the skills and confidence to apply EBD themselves. Training can be delivered online or face to face, and is supported by practical resources, tools and guidance. This enables teams to apply learning immediately and embed EBD into everyday improvement work across services.

Testimonials

"Acute hospital care is all too often focused on bed-days, waiting lists and discharge decisions. Experience Based Design helps clinicians focus more on improvements that matter to patients and provide a better experience"
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Professor Simon Conroy
Geriatrician - Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust
"NHS Elect's EBD tool is one of the most useful and simple ways I have come across of capturing meaningful patient experience as part of a largescale service improvement initiative."
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Nathan Hall
Deputy Director Diagnostics - Physiological Science NHS England

Why choose NHS Elect?

We are the leading provider of EBD in the UK. We have extensive experience of designing processes and systems to support this quality improvement technique in a wide range of settings, including inpatient and outpatient services, acute frailty pathways and staff wellbeing. 

Our online tools and app allow teams to undertake emotional mapping at scale, rapidly bringing service user perspective into improvement projects. We can help you make key impprovements that matter to stakeholders.

Leaders in EBD

We are the leading provider of the Experience Based Design approach

Cost effective

We offer cost-effective solutions tailored for healthcare

Team of experts

Our team has over 20 years of clinical experience improving services

Meet our award-winning team

The award-winning Improvement Networks Team at NHS Elect has over 20 years of experience working with front-line teams to improve services and systems. We have successfully supported over 140 hospitals in England and teams internationally to adopt and improve their clinical models. Our Acute Frailty Network has won two HSJ awards in the last 12 months.

Meet our team >>

Get in touch

We would like to hear more about your needs. To arrange a call with our team, please email our Managing Director, Deborah Thompson.

Contact Deborah