What is lived experience in health and care?

Lived experience is the first-hand knowledge someone has of a condition or a service because they have lived through it. In health and care it includes patients and service users, their carers and families, experts by experience, and frontline staff. It is treated as a form of evidence in its own right, alongside clinical and operational data.

What is the Friends and Family Test?

The Friends and Family Test (FFT) is a national NHS feedback tool that asks people about their experience of a service shortly after they have used it. Every NHS provider in England is expected to offer it. It gives a continuous, near-real-time read on patient experience that sits alongside more detailed surveys.

What is the difference between patient experience and patient satisfaction?

Satisfaction asks whether someone was happy. Experience asks what actually happened to them: whether they were kept informed, treated with dignity, involved in decisions about their care. Two people can report the same satisfaction score and completely different experiences, which is why experience data is the more useful of the two when you are working out what to change.

What is co-production, and what makes a People's Council count as evidence?

Co-production means the people who use a service helping to design and run it, as equal partners with staff, rather than being consulted once the decisions are already made. A People's Council is a standing forum of service users that does that work. It counts as evidence when its discussions are recorded, its recommendations are tracked, and you can show what changed as a result. Minutes and action tracking are what turn a meeting into an audit trail.

How do you reach service users and frontline staff who do not sit at a desk?

Through a mix of routes rather than one. A survey can be completed on a phone, on a shared tablet on a ward, on paper, or with help from a member of staff or an advocate. The point is to drop the assumption that everyone has an email address and a quiet moment at a computer, because in health and care a lot of people have neither.

Lived experience, captured and acted on

Most health and care services will tell you they listen to the people they serve. Fewer can demonstrate that listening, and then show how they acted on it. That is the difference working with SocialOptic makes.

This year we are a proud sponsor of the National Lived Experience Awards 2026. The awards celebrate co-produced, service-user-led projects across mental health, autism and learning disability services. We are supporting them because they stand for the same thing as our work: everyone has a voice that should be heard. That voice takes many forms, sometimes unspoken and sometimes spoken through the voice of others.

What lived experience means in health and care

Lived experience is what a person knows about a condition, a service or a system because they have been through it themselves. In health and care it covers patients and service users, the carers and families around them, experts by experience who advise on and help design services, and the staff who deliver care day to day. Each of those is a distinct voice.

Co-production is what happens when those voices help shape a service. It means the people who use a service and the people who run it working together on decisions, from the wording of a survey through to the redesign of a ward round.

How SocialOptic captures those voices in a clear and structured way

Capturing a voice is just the start. The work is turning thousands of text comments into something that can be understood and acted on, and then being able to show how that was followed through.

SurveyOptic is the layer that does that. Our survey and insights platform runs everything from a single ward’s patient experience survey to national statutory consultations. Text analysis reads comments at a scale that no team could manage by hand, and it groups what people are saying, based on the meaning, rather than just counting words. Then it provides the link from the bigger picture down to the individual words. For feedback forums we help to record the minutes and track the actions that come out of them, so a commitment can be followed through to the change it made. What you are left with is a clear record: what was heard, what was decided, and what was done.

If the responses come back only from the confident, the English-speaking and the digitally comfortable, you haven’t captured lived experience. SurveyOptic runs in over 60 languages and is built and tested to WCAG 2.2 AA. You can see in real time who you aren’t hearing from by language, by site or by a range of other dimensions, so you can act while there’s still time to do something about it.

We are the measurement and evidence layer. We don’t run services or deliver care; we free up the time of those that do, by cutting out the admin and creating the space to be heard and to listen. For those who provide the care as well as those who experience it. Staff are a lived experience voice in their own right. They see the same service from the inside, every day. The same platform runs your staff engagement, pulse and wellbeing surveys, so what everyone experiences can finally be read side by side.

Trusted across the system

Lived experience is captured at every level of health and care, and SocialOptic is used at every level too: national regulators, individual providers, single wards.

National policy and regulation

Organisation	What SocialOptic does
MHRA	The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency runs its public consultations on SurveyOptic, from SocialOptic.
DHSC	The Department of Health and Social Care uses SocialOptic to process the data for its public consultations, run under gov.uk.
Patient Safety Commissioner	Ran the statutory Principles of Better Patient Safety consultation, required under the Medicines and Medical Devices Act 2021, on the SocialOptic platform.

Frameworks

Organisation	What SocialOptic does
NHS SBS	SocialOptic is a supplier on the NHS Shared Business Services Patient and Citizen Communication framework, Lot 5, covering patient and citizen experience including the Friends and Family Test.

Why trust us with this

SocialOptic holds ISO/IEC 27001:2022 and ISO 9001:2015. All data is hosted in the UK. We have been on the government’s G-Cloud framework for every wave since 2015, and we have served government, health and education for more than fifteen years.

Why we back the National Lived Experience Awards

The National Lived Experience Awards have run since 2013. They started with service users at Cygnet Hospital Derby who wanted to recognise what their peers were achieving, and they have grown into a national event.

What makes them worth supporting is the rule at their centre. Every nomination must be co-produced with service users or residents, and projects delivered solely by staff are not eligible. That is the same principle our software is built around. The categories run from the Outstanding Leadership Award through to the Social Care Star Award and the Mark Britton Service User Choice Award, voted on the day.

We are proud to support an event that is run by the people it celebrates. It is about the clearest statement we can make of what we think this work is for.

Common questions

What is lived experience in health and care?: Lived experience is the first-hand knowledge someone has of a condition or a service because they have lived through it. In health and care it includes patients and service users, their carers and families, experts by experience, and frontline staff. It is treated as a form of evidence in its own right, alongside clinical and operational data.
What is the Friends and Family Test?: The Friends and Family Test (FFT) is a national NHS feedback tool that asks people about their experience of a service shortly after they have used it. Every NHS provider in England is expected to offer it. It gives a continuous, near-real-time read on patient experience that sits alongside more detailed surveys.
What is the difference between patient experience and patient satisfaction?: Satisfaction asks whether someone was happy. Experience asks what actually happened to them: whether they were kept informed, treated with dignity, involved in decisions about their care. Two people can report the same satisfaction score and completely different experiences, which is why experience data is the more useful of the two when you are working out what to change.
What is co-production, and what makes a People’s Council count as evidence?: Co-production means the people who use a service helping to design and run it, as equal partners with staff, rather than being consulted once the decisions are already made. A People’s Council is a standing forum of service users that does that work. It counts as evidence when its discussions are recorded, its recommendations are tracked, and you can show what changed as a result.
How do you reach service users and frontline staff who do not sit at a desk?: Through a mix of routes rather than one. A survey can be completed on a phone, on a shared tablet on a ward, on paper, or with help from a member of staff or an advocate. The point is to drop the assumption that everyone has an email address and a quiet moment at a computer.

See it working on your data

The quickest way to understand what SocialOptic does is to see it running on the sort of feedback you already collect. Book a demo and we will walk you through it.

Request a demo