In the NHS we tend to have a negative reaction to the word “customer” but patients are indeed customers. They pay for services through their taxes and the worst stories about the NHS centre on our failure to recognise that.

For several months I have been taking part in a programme run by the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement to give hospital chief executives ideas about how to improve our patients' experiences.

As part of this we have been thinking about the lessons we can learn from other sectors. As chief executives, we wanted to hear from organisations we consider to be particularly good at customer service. We believed that the John Lewis Partnership was one where the ethos was not so culturally different from ours so we organised a visit to the John Lewis store in Oxford Street to see how they look after customers. It is something that we feel Great Ormond Street and the NHS generally can learn a lot from.

We met four floor managers - the people who have the most contact with customers. Then we were taken around the shop to talk to workers. Generally in the NHS we tend to focus customer care training on front-line staff such as receptionists or restaurant workers and it was a wake-up moment for me to realise that everybody needs to think of patients and families in the same way.

At John Lewis all the staff focus on customers in a way that I don't think we do as managers or clinical staff. The NHS tends to concentrate on professional expertise without thinking about the patient experience.

What patients want is actually quite simple - doctors to introduce themselves and to be told what's going on. We know that innately, but we hadn't thought how we could best deliver it. We need to think about how we can ensure people aren't wandering around not sure where to go or uncertain about how long they are going to need to wait in different places.

This is particularly true in outpatients and A&E departments, where a lot of the time patients haven't got a clue what's going on.

At John Lewis someone was assigned, for six hours, to make sure everyone was being looked after and dealt with in an appropriate way. We could learn from this and, rather than have somebody to do each bit of a process, we should be making sure that the whole process works, particularly for people who have not been to hospital before.

This year we are going to try to have somebody on each floor of the hospital to answer patients' queries and make sure they understand what is happening. Rather than thinking that customer care is only for front-line serving staff, we need to make it the business of all of us. If we do, then hopefully patients will have a much better experience and the hospital process will run much more smoothly for them.

Soon some of my team are going to visit the O2 call centre to see how they manage customers. In hospitals nowadays there is a lot of call centre-type activity compared with 10 or 15 years ago.

We need to find out how we can do that in a way that feels personal for patients. It's not just a matter of making it more efficient, it's making the hospital experience more user friendly.

- Dr Jane Collins is the chief executive of Great Ormond Street hospital

Times Recommends

• Lies and cover-up at MG Rover exposed by report
• High oil prices push manufacturing costs up
• Primark founder steps down as chief executive