Patient Advice and Liaison Services: strengthening the voices of individual service users in health-care organizations.

Objective: To explore the roles of Patient Advice and Liaison Services (PALS) in their interactions with service users.

Context: Every National Health Service health-care provider in England now has a PALS, which provides service users with information and help in resolving concerns and dissatisfactions with health care.

Design: Longitudinal qualitative study, 2002-4. This paper draws on data from 27 semi-structured interviews.

Setting And Participants: PALS personnel working in six case study PALS in London.

Findings: PALS personnel adopt seven roles in order to support their clients in sorting out problems with health care: information provider; listener; messenger (passing on information from service users to staff); go-between (passing information forward and back); supporter (helping service users to present their own views); mediator (when two or more parties are in dispute); resource mobilizer (when the support of senior staff or other agencies is necessary to resolve a problem).

Conclusions: Though these are not new functions, PALS is a universal service which is better placed than front-line health-care staff to offer such support, and increases choice for service users looking for sources of information and advice.