Annual Review 2009 - Sandwell & West Birmingham Hospitals

9
Chapter One
Responding to our
patients
We continually listen to our patients and make
improvements to their experience where we
can. Whether it is improving patient access
to Chiropody services to ensure patients’ nail
care needs are met, or introducing measures
to better support grieving parents, we want
our patients to tell us what is most important
to them.
Improving the patient experience will continue
to be a high priority for the Trust and you can
expect to see more of these initiatives over
the coming year. Improved notice boards,
a review of patient information and the
introduction of ward based surveys will be
among the next things to put in place and
we will also be looking at new ways to tell
patients and local people what we are doing
in response to their comments and piloting a
service-led suggestion scheme in our stroke
service.
Patient satisfaction with the trust is at an all
time high, according to the results of the 2008
national inpatient survey.
The survey, published by the Care Quality
Commission, reveals that patients put the trust in
the top 20% of trusts in England for ‘operations
and procedures’ and ‘leaving hospital’, two of the
ten overall categories.
Patients at Sandwell Hospital, City Hospital in
Birmingham, and Rowley Regis Hospital rated
the trust as one of the best in the country for
pain relief, explanations about operations or
procedures – before and after the procedure,
written information on leaving hospital and
explanations about the purpose of medications.
Chief Nurse Rachel Overfield said; “The survey
results are very encouraging and reflect some of
the work we have been doing to improve
patients’ experiences. A lot more work has taken
Satisfaction at
all time high
place since the survey was carried out and we
hope to see even more improvements next year.”
Amongst a large number of other areas where the
trust had made significant improvements from
2007, 12% more patients described the ward as
‘very clean’, 9% more said the bathroom was ‘very
clean’, 10% more patients said they saw doctors
always washing their hands between patients, and
9% more said the same about nurses. Amongst
other areas of improvement were the meal service
and explanations about what was happening from
staff – an area that was already rated very high.
In all, 22 questions saw significant improvements
and only two showed a worse position than 2007.
The main challenge for the trust is around mixed
sex accommodation. “This is particularly difficult
for us because of the age and design of many of
our buildings,” explained Rachel Overfield.
“Our long term plan is for a state-of-the-art new
hospital where mixed sex accommodation won’t
be an issue. However, we are working hard
to ensure we can make improvements to our
current facilities and plan to tackle as much
of the problem as we can during this year.”
These results are incorporated into our Patient
Experience Action Plan. They can be found on
the Care Quality Commission website –
www.cqc.org.uk/patientsurveyinpatient2008.cfm.