The Essence of Care arose from a commitment in Making a Difference - the national nursing, midwifery and health visiting strategy - to explore the benefits of benchmarking to help improve the quality of what might be described as the fundamental and essential aspects of care.

More recently The NHS Plan has reinforced the importance of getting the basics right and of improving the patient experience.

The Essence of Care has been designed to support the measures to improve quality and will contribute to the introduction of clinical governance at local level.

The benchmarking process outlined in The Essence of Care helps practitioners to take a structured approach to sharing and comparing practice, enabling them to identify the best and to develop action plans to remedy poor practice.

The approach is fundamentally qualitative and involves the identification of patient focused best practice in what might be described as the softer aspects of care, but which are nevertheless crucial to the quality of care patients' experience. A variety of types of evidence have been used - not only research-derived knowledge - to establish the benchmark standards, including key sources such as national guidance and policies. The national benchmark standards have been tested, refined and endorsed during a process of consensus agreement involving over 2,000 patients, professionals, and user group representatives.