From 1 April 2013, all in-patients on wards and those visiting the A&E department at St. Mary’s Hospital, Newport, Isle of Wight have been offered a ‘Friends and Family Test’.
The test was introduced in April 2013 across England to allow patients the opportunity to feed back their views of the care or treatment they have received at St. Mary’s Hospital, in near ‘real time’.
“Seeking and acting on patient feedback is key to improving the quality of healthcare services and putting patients at the centre of what we do,” says Alan Sheward, Executive Director of Nursing and Workforce at Isle of Wight NHS Trust.
Article continues below this advertisement Mr Sheward continued: “This provides us with valuable intelligence about the quality of healthcare provided by our Trust which we can then use to improve services.”
When patients leave A &E or the inpatient setting, or within 48 hours of their discharge, they are invited to give their feedback which includes a simple question: “How likely are you to recommend our ward/A&E department to friends and family if they needed similar care or treatment?”
The results for April 2013 show that the overall response rate across eight Trusts in the Wessex area indicated that Isle of Wight NHS Trust was achieving the highest (18.6%) response rate to the question (range 2.2% to 18.6%). Amongst eight Trusts across the Wessex area, in-patients using St. Mary’s Hospital scored the hospital at 64% (range 43% to 84%) whilst those attending A&E scored the department at 73% (range 43% to 80%).
Mr Sheward continued: “We will be able to use this and the additional feedback we receive, alongside other information, to identify and tackle concerns at an early stage, improve the quality of care we provide, and celebrate our successes. Indeed at the Trust Board meeting this week we had verbatim accounts from two patients about services in the Children’s Ward and the Coronary Care Unit. One of the comments made was about the absence of clocks on wards making it difficult for patients to tell what the time is. This is something we can fix quite quickly and without too much cost. Whilst our overall response rate is good compared to other Trusts and patients are scoring the A&E services highly we want to see an improvement on the in-patient score. Doing simple things like putting up clocks may help us do that.”
Isle of Wight NHS Trust Board meets in public monthly and reviews extensive performance, quality, finance and workforce information every month. The Trust works in partnership with Sunshine Radio at St. Mary’s Hospital who as well as providing radio services to the patient bedside also film patient interviews for the Trust Board to view.
Nationally, the ‘Friends and Family’ results for NHS Trusts and individual wards will be published on the NHS Choices website at www.iow.nhs.uk, allowing the public to compare hospital performance and make choices about their care.
