We need to hear what people honestly think

Today's blog post is a guest post contributed by Michelle Briggs. Michelle is team leader of the Sexual Health Outreach/Prevent Team at Locala Community Partnerships CIC.

Patient Opinion has been a vital component in helping us deliver our sexual health outreach service to young people across Kirklees.

We have had reporting systems within health for a long time that help us identify quantitative data, like footfall through services, demographics etc. But for us in Outreach, we are just as interested, if not more, in how service users feel about our services. We want to know what works for them, where services are best placed – are they acceptable, are they accessible?

We do a lot of work with young people under 25, as well as other groups in the community who find it difficult to access mainstream services. By taking our service out to them, we can ensure that everyone has an opportunity to address their sexual health needs, and working with our partner agencies, together we can provide brief sexual health interventions such as opportunistic chlamydia screening, condom distribution, advice, support and signposting.

We also provide contraception services, including emergency hormonal contraception, depo injections, repeat pill, pregnancy testing and chlamydia screening within a Sixth Form College. Receiving feedback from those service users allows us to influence and shape our service provision with commissioners.

Patient Opinion gives people an equal voice

I think some staff are nervous about the possibility of negative feedback about their service, but we take a very open approach to this. We need to hear what people honestly think about our service. If there are things we can improve, we would far rather know so we can make changes. We want to get it right and we can only do that with the involvement of our service users.

Recently we had some feedback via Patient Opinion about the gender boxes on our specimen/screening forms. A client posted that the form did not offer an option reflecting their gender identity and they were 100% right: the forms were non-inclusive and needed updating. This has resulted in lots of discussion in our team, consultation with our local LGBTQ group and liaison and collaboration with our colleagues in the biochemistry and microbiology labs and the suppliers of our specimen forms. Without that feedback, we might well have continued on unaware – and not meeting our service user’s needs.

We value the help of our service users in shaping the services we provide. But contributing can be daunting for some, who may lack the confidence to join participation groups or speak out in person. Patient Opinion gives them an equal voice. We have a duty to listen, act and serve.