Annual Report and Accounts - The Great Western Hospital

3.25 Using patient experience to drive service improvements
3.25.1 Comment Cards
Across the Trust we use ‘Tell us how we’re doing’ comment cards to capture four elements of
patient feedback:
- What was good about your visit?
- Was there anything we could do better?
- Would you recommend us to a friend?
- Please tell us about any person or team who provided you with excellent care.
A measure of satisfaction regularly used in the commercial industry is recommendation to a friend,
which is included within the comment cards. It has proved challenging to generate enough
responses via these comment cards to confidently track performance, particularly in relation to the
patient recommendation question. Towards the end of the year each directorate was set a monthly
target of returning 100 completed cards to enable a statistically reliable comparison to be made
each month.
The response rate is reported by Directorates in the monthly patient experience report to the
Executive Committee and Trust Board. Due to low response rates, the last reliable indicator of
patient recommendation was in January 2012 tracking at 97%. During the other months when the
response rate was large enough for a statistically significant response, the recommendation rate
ranged from 84% to 97% showing a high level of satisfaction.
3.25.2 Online Feedback
The Communications Team monitors and interacts with patients through feedback through online
channels. The Trust is experiencing a rapid growth in online feedback and user interaction through
relatively new websites such as PatientOpinion.org. This site has been established as a ‘Trip
Advisor’ style site for users of the health service and is likely to become more widely used by
patients in the future. During the course of the year, the site established formal links with NHS
Choices and information posted on Patient Opinion is automatically linked to the NHS Choices
website (and vice versa). Several thousand people view the GWH sections of these sites on a
monthly basis, so it is important to be actively engaged with users through these channels.
Sites such as this present both an opportunity for the Trust in providing a rich vein of user
feedback, and at the same time they present a challenge as typically, people posting on these sites
expect a response within 48 hours. This means the Trust needs to be much more responsive than
we have been previously and we need to ensure responses (as they are in the public domain) not
only respect confidentiality but also are actually useful to the user and those viewing the site in the
future.
Patients and the public are also able to ‘follow’ the Trust on Twitter and Facebook. There are over
450 followers at present. In the year ahead PALS will be looking at alternative ways to seek
feedback such as using a dedicated children’s PALS website aimed at engaging and sharing
information with children and young people.
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