Care Opinion for in-patient mental health & learning disability service

Bluestone is a 96 bedded Mental Health, Dementia and Learning Disability inpatient setting in the Southern Health and Social Care Trust in Northern Ireland. There are seven wards including a Learning Disability ward, psychiatry of old age, Dementia assessment, 3 Adult Acute Mental Health wards and a Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU). Our three Acute Wards each have their own speciality, these being Perinatal Mental Health, Eating Disorders, Child and Adolescent Mental Health and Addictions.

We use Care Opinion as a means of capturing our patient and carer experience and we have been very lucky to have had assistance of a Feedback facilitator in the early days of Care Opinion implementation, which really helped to embed Care Opinion into our day-to-day business on our wards. We incorporated Care Opinion into our Discharge processes where, our Care Opinion facilitator, attended each ward on a weekly basis to support patients and carers to share their stories and promote Care Opinion.

We created Care Opinion display boards throughout Bluestone, one placed at our coffee shop, where it was great to see families, visitors, patients, and staff taking time to read through them while they were waiting for their latte! We have also recently added posters with QR codes, as well as Care Opinion information displayed in the five most common languages used in the SHSCT.

Another one of our Care Opinion boards is located in the main service corridor outside our Hospital Conference Room where we host all Regional meetings, facilitate job interviews and academic teaching days and again, this has been a valuable opportunity to promote Care Opinion and showcase the fantastic feedback that we have received for our wards and staff. We also utilise the ‘Greatix’ system in our Trust, this is a vehicle where when we receive positive stories, feedback and compliments relating to particular wards and staff, we complete a Greatix for those wards, staff or teams and the relative person or party receive a certificate that can be used for Revalidation or Medical appraisal. We also have Greatix display boards across our wards and common service areas as a means of celebrating our staff.

We are piloting a Care Opinion Board on Bronte ward displays up to date stories as well as data in relation to response rate, compliments, and complaints. The board is brightly coloured so it is very eye catching and attracts a lot of attention on the ward. This is invaluable in driving forward quality improvements and has been instrumental in the development of an ethos of collective leadership and energy in regard to service development.

We have identified a ‘Care Opinion Champion’ on each ward and we have also added Care Opinion as a fixed agenda item for our monthly staff and Carer meetings. We have encouraged more staff across all disciplines in Bluestone to complete Care Opinion Training to increase the quality of responses and improve response times. When we receive constructive or negative feedback, we log a ‘planned change’ with actions and areas for improvement and these are discussed and reviewed within our shared learning section of our agenda, at our weekly management meeting. We also utilise Social Media Platforms to share positive stories as well as some of the improvement initiatives that we have Implemented to improve awareness and we have tied all of this into our implementation of ‘Safewards’ across all of our 7 wards under the Safewards intervention, ‘Discharge Messages’.