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Patient Experience

We are committed to improving our patients’ experience. Along with safety and clinical effectiveness; patient experience is a key element of quality.
We are working with our patients and the public on a programme of work to improve patient experience. We want to know what works well and where we need to make improvements.

Listening, learning and responding

Our framework; Listening, learning and responding, describes how we collect and use patient feedback

Listening:
We listen to feedback from our patients in a number of ways.

The NHS national survey programme is part of the government's commitment to ensure that patient feedback is obtained so that it can be used to inform the continued development and improvement of healthcare services. These national surveys are used to compare performance between trusts and to monitor improvements to services over time. For further information about our latest national survey please see the Care Directory at the Care Quality Commission.

We now have a programme of monthly surveys for our inpatients, outpatients and maternity patients. We receive well over 1000 responses from these surveys each month. The results from these surveys are shared widely with staff in the hospital from the Trust board to the ward.

We also monitor NHS Choices closely; this is a web site where patients can leave comments about their experiences. Additionally, we receive valuable feedback from our Patients Advisory Liaison Service (PALS) and complaints team.

Learning and responding:
Receiving all this feedback is only useful if we look at it in a meaningful way and learn from it. The results from our surveys are shared widely with staff in the hospital from the Trust board to the ward. This means that we are able to see what is working well and plan improvements for where it is not working so well.

If it matters to you it matters to us

Case Study 1 – Your bedside guide.
Our patients have told us that coming into hospital can be a new experience and life on the ward is sometimes daunting especially when you don’t know who is who and what you can or can’t do. We have worked with patients and our staff to develop a bedside guide. The guide, which will be available at every bedside (and now as a download - pdf, 825KB), contains the type of information that patients often ask about when they come into hospital. We hope that it will ease some of the anxiety described by patients.