Patient Opinion
Who?
Rotherham NHS Trust and patientopinion.org - a website dedicated to patient feedback, on the care they and their family members have received in hospitals across the UK.
What?
The NHS trust set up a training day at Rotherham Hospital for a team of its nurses, with the aim of bringing them together with the people who use their service. It was designed to help the different parties see each other’s point of view and to improve the overall quality of care.
There were three main objectives for the training day;
- For staff to consider, debate and renew their commitment to excellent patient care.
- To understand how each interaction with the family members as well as the patients was as important as the next.
- To give a family that had posted their bad experience of the hospital on Patient Opinion a chance to engage positively with the hospital and see how their feedback helped move the improvement of patient care forward.
How?
Dead Earnest worked closely with the Deputy Chief Nurse at Rotherham Hospital to create a number of different scenes that would demonstrate the successes and failures of the hospital employees when interacting with patients, families and friends. They would present scenarios that were familiar and understandable to hospital staff, highlight the difficulties faced and prompt debates about the best way forward.
Crucially, the training day would be attended by people that had had a bad experience with the service – and subsequently posted it on patientopinion.org – so that they could really have a positive input into the work of the Trust. This was not an attempt to lay blame or show anger, it was an opportunity for the two groups to come together and come up with ways to deliver the best possible service: that is what both parties wanted and that is what they worked towards.
Split across the entire training day, containing genuine letters received from patients and their families and facilitated by both the Deputy Chief Nurse and us, the performance focussed on the pressures nursing staff face every day (this particular situation was a stressful birthday meal) and how a bad experience can be brought into the workplace and result in poor communication with a relative of a patient. The emphasis was very much on the need to be welcoming and approachable to these people who are in very difficult situations themselves. Often talking to the relatives is as important as caring for the patients as it leaves them with a positive impression of the hospital and a knowledge that the staff really are working to the best of their ability. The performance ended with the relative, after his mother’s death, calmly writing a damning letter of complaint about the care he and his mother received.
The performances were followed by engaging and animated discussions on what goes wrong, what goes right and how they could all work to make sure similar scenarios never occurred in their hospital.
Sounds like it could have been quite a tricky one. Did you pull it off?
It was really rewarding to bring together different groups of people and let them understand, engage and work with each other to really make a difference in such an important sector.
“Your ability to create a safe and friendly space, which enabled a large group of people of very differing backgrounds to engage, contribute and feel valued, was extraordinary. Your energy and focus made the whole day work” Dr James Munro, Patient Opinion 0114-281-6256