Driving improvements with patient feedback

I’m Samantha Whelan and I am the Patient Experience Midwife at the Pennine Acute NHS Trust. Previously I worked in the community setting, antenatal clinics, and in research. My overall aim is to improve the service for women and their families based on their feedback.

The Women and Children’s Division at The Pennine Acute Trust signed up to a pilot scheme with Care Opinion to give women and their families the opportunity to leave honest anonymous feedback about their experience of our maternity service.

By encouraging women to tell their stories we are able to listen to their suggestions on how to improve our service. Positive stories about our maternity service are always a pleasure to receive and they are shared amongst the staff. However, critical feedback also highlights the areas that our maternity team can improve thus developing a mechanism for continued reflective learning and drive up standards within our department which is something that we are wholly committed to at Pennine Acute.

As a Trust, this public, transparent engagement aligns perfectly with our commitment to service and quality improvement based on patient experience.

I find time on a daily basis to be present on the wards and clinic and encourage women to tell their stories electronically. It is helpful that we offer free wi-fi at the trust. Freepost leaflets are given to women who prefer to share their experience via paper. This is then entered on to the Care Opinion website.

The stories are moderated by Care Opinion and then appear on the website. We can respond directly to the author of the story and let them know when a change has been made.  Using this platform for sharing stories provides the staff with direct access to positive feedback which can be motivational and is always good to hear.

(Click the image above to see the live interactive tag cloud.)

The pilot has only been running for a short while but we have already made some service improvements on the postnatal ward, as a direct result of feedback from women and their families.

We have introduced a cleaning card to inform women that their room has been cleaned if they are not present, following feedback indicating some confusion on behalf of a patient. Additionally, a ward information leaflet is now at every bedside. This is because women were telling us via Care Opinion that they were unsure about visiting and meal times. Also included in the leaflet are guidelines for partners staying overnight and mobile phone usage.

Women were reporting the noise levels were too high overnight.  Having this powerful real-time evidence from patients has made it easier to push through changes. Having the facility to engage with patients online and show positive reactions to stories has helped front line staff to see the value of patient feedback.

Going forward we are going to introduce a Maternity Quality Improvement Forum. The group will consist of maternity staff, stakeholders and service users. The aim of this group will be to use the feedback from Care Opinion and commence a project that uses quality improvement methodology improve the service for our women and their families.