Adding the personal touch to increase stories received

I'm Kate Wood, Community Engagement Manager at the Herefordshire and Worcestershire Health and Care Trust. I work in a small team that has been rolling out Care Opinion for the last year.

We see a wide range of patients and their families in a variety of settings. This includes in people’s homes, hospitals and in community buildings. We wanted to work with staff to find out how it was best to promote Care Opinion.

This includes an hour-long session with the specific service or team. We talk about care opinion, how to collect stories, and how the responders will respond to them. We also spend time looking at barriers that the team may face and how we can overcome them. From this discussion we then design specific materials that best suit their patients. 

We realised that for some of our services, something more personal was needed. Patients within our community hospitals can spend months on the ward. So they had built up a relationship with the staff.

After some thought, we created a greetings card. The card includes Care Opinion and a section where staff can write their own message. Each card also has a personally chosen image on the front that has been selected by the team. After creating these, we found that services started to receive more stories too!

We have lots of community and learning disability services. Patients can stay on the case load for months, or years. So, sending a formal ‘corporate’ feedback leaflet didn’t feel right and was too impersonal. Again, we worked with the teams to create bespoke greetings cards. They are given out at different times during the episode of care. This could be after assessments, diagnosis, or within different seasons.

We also have end of life services. These needed careful consideration over what type of feedback method could be used, during such a sensitive time. The clinical teams asked for a condolence card. These are sent a couple of weeks after the death, with care opinion information on back.

But it doesn't stop there. We are now working with our children and young people's service to roll out similar greetings cards. Some teams are running competitions for children to design the front of the card. Others have created coloring sheet style fronts that provide a fun activity for the child during the appointment.