NHS England has announced the creation of a new National Director of Patient Experience role, recruiting a prominent charity sector executive to lead the initiative. The appointment signals a renewed focus on integrating patient perspectives and feedback directly into the highest levels of national healthcare administration.

Jacob Lant will step into the newly established position this autumn. He moves from his current post as chief executive of National Voices, a coalition of health and social care charities, where he built a track record of advocating for service users and engaging with communities that are often overlooked by mainstream policymaking. In his new role, Lant will be responsible for championing the patient voice within NHS England and for overseeing reforms to how the health service gathers, analyses and acts on feedback and complaints.

At the centre of his mandate is the creation of a dedicated patient experience directorate. The body will operate jointly across NHS England and the Department of Health and Social Care, an arrangement that departs from the more siloed structures that have typically governed patient feedback work. The directorate is intended to make sure that national policy decisions and local care delivery are shaped consistently by patient insight, drawing on data and digital tools to capture experiences at scale rather than relying on periodic surveys or isolated complaint reviews.

The decision to place the directorate across both organisations reflects a wider effort within government to cut down on duplication between the department and the arm's length body it oversees. Officials have argued for some time that fragmented reporting lines make it harder to translate patient feedback into meaningful change, with information often collected but rarely acted upon in a coordinated way. The new structure is meant to close that gap, giving patient experience data a more direct line into decisions taken at both departmental and operational level.

Lant's appointment comes at a moment when the health service is under sustained pressure to demonstrate that reform efforts are grounded in the realities faced by patients, rather than driven solely by financial or operational targets. His background gives him particular standing on this point. National Voices has spent years pushing for better representation of marginalised groups within health policy, and his move into a senior NHS England post is likely to be read as a signal that the organisation wants that expertise embedded within its own structures rather than kept at arm's length as an external stakeholder.

The scope of the role extends beyond individual patient interactions. Lant will also be expected to work with voluntary, community and social enterprise organisations, sectors that have long argued they hold valuable insight into how care is experienced by people who do not always engage easily with formal NHS channels. Building these relationships is likely to be one of his early priorities once he takes up the post.

Details of the directorate's staffing and precise reporting lines have yet to be published, and much will depend on how quickly the joint structure with the Department of Health and Social Care can be made to function in practice. Cross-departmental units of this kind have a mixed record within Whitehall, and the success of the initiative will rest on whether patient experience data is genuinely allowed to influence decisions rather than simply being collected and filed.

For now, the appointment represents a clear statement of intent. By placing a charity sector figure in a senior national role and giving that role authority spanning two organisations, NHS England has signalled that patient experience is meant to sit closer to the centre of decision making than it has in the past. Whether the new directorate delivers on that ambition will become clearer once Lant is in post and the department begins to set out how the structure will work day to day.

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