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Purpose -There is growing focus on the importance of attending to "patient experience" in delivery of health services, and the design of clinical quality indicators. "Patient experience" (also termed "user experience") has been augmented by "staff" and "carer" experience in the "service experience" quality indicator for emergency care in England. But "patient experience" is a contested concept which patients, clinicians, politicians, managers and academics view differently. Design/methodology/approach -The purpose of this paper is to examine approaches to thinking about patient experience. The author describes three key approaches to conceptualising patient experience and identify their philosophical origins, then asks what aspects of patient experience ought to be treated as key to measuring the quality of emergency care. The discussion is illustrated with extracts from a patient interview describing emergency care following placental abruption.The author demonstrates that differing purposes and differing conceptions of care direct attention to different aspects of patient experience. Findings -Donabedian's insight was that conceptions of quality are inevitably related to conceptions of value and the author concurs, arguing that decisions about which aspects of patient experience to include in clinical quality indicators are ethical as well as technical judgements. Practical implications -This paper is of value to those concerned with quality improvement because it clarifies the meaning of patient experience in the context of care quality measurement, and highlights the ethical implications of experiential data. Originality/value -It is a novel synthesis of understandings of patient experience and clinical quality in emergency care.

COVID-19 has exposed the National Health Service (NHS) to the greatest challenge in its existence, highlighting the need for nimble, reactive and inclusive leadership. It is set against a backdrop of a workforce recruitment and retention crisis predicted to worsen in coming years. There is a need to do things differently in healthcare, including better diversity and distribution of leadership. We make the case for senior non-consultant doctors, in the UK more usually referred to as specialty and associate specialist or locally employed doctors. These skilled, experienced medics have much to offer yet are frequently overlooked, with little guidance or support from central organisations and medical colleges or within NHS Trusts themselves. In this commentary, we suggest ways this workforce might be better tapped into, to the benefit of patients and healthcare systems, as well as the doctors themselves.

This paper derives from a grounded theory study of how Medical Directors working within the UK National Health Service manage the moral quandaries that they encounter as leaders of health care organizations. The reason health care organizations exist is to provide better care for individuals through providing shared resources for groups of people. This creates a paradox at the heart of health care organization, because serving the interests of groups sometimes runs counter to serving the needs of individuals. The paradox presents ethical dilemmas at every level of the organization, from the boardroom to the bedside. Medical Directors experience these organizational ethical dilemmas most acutely by virtue of their position in the organization. As doctors, their professional ethic obliges them to put the interests of individual patients first. As executive directors, their role is to help secure the delivery of services that meet the needs of the whole patient population. What should they do when the interests of groups of patients, and of individual patients, appear to conflict? The first task of an ethical healthcare organization is to secure the trust of patients, and two examples of medical ethical leadership are discussed against this background. These examples suggest that conflict between individual and population needs is integral to health care organization, so dilemmas addressed at one level of the organization inevitably re-emerge in altered form at other levels. Finally, analysis of the ethical activity that Medical Directors have described affords insight into the interpersonal components of ethical skill and knowledge. (Keio J Med 57 (1) : 37 -44, March 2008)