Public & patient engagement
Our goal is to deliver a better experience for those who use our services – and we use feedback from patients and from the general public to help us to do this.
One of the issues within such a diverse organisation like Shropshire Community Health Trust is to be able to have a common theme running through the different patient experience surveys and to be able to manage this work and our response to the feedback effectively – so that is has positive outcomes for patients.
This is vital if we are to understand issues in all our services and not concentrate on some services to the detriment of others.
Innovations planned for the next year
We will...
- establish a Patient Experience and Engagement Group to oversee and manage the patient experience work that is going on within the Trust.
- develop an outline Patient Experience and Engagement Framework to bring all the differing work together in a cohesive and clear manner.
- implement the “Net Promoter” question in all relevant patient experience surveys. The question to be asked is “how likely is it that you would recommend this service to friends and family”? NHS Midlands and East consider the use of the net promoter to be a proxy of patient and customer experience and since April 2012 it has formed a regional Commissioning for Quality and Innovation (CQUIN) requirement.
We have...
- recently become a registered member of Patient Opinion, the UK's leading independent non-profit feedback platform for health services and will use the feedback gathered to drive improvements in patient experience.
- plans for the PALS service to be visibly present within the community hospitals to ensure that we reach out to patients within the community both those that are in the hospital and those that visit the outpatient departments.
Other work...
- A PALS leaflet is currently accessible on the Trust’s website and will shortly be available in different locations across the Trust and outside the Trust (in libraries, community centres, charity groups) together with posters which will be displayed across all sites.
- A communication card is also being developed for community staff to hand to patients and carers providing contact details of PALS and complaints manager to enable them to make a confidential contact with the Trust should they wish to.
