Nurses Day! - Birmingham Children's Hospital

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Since April 2012, in preparation for the Department
of Health’s national Friends and Family test, which
commenced in April 2013, we have been asking
parents and carers on their day of discharge how
likely it is they would recommend the hospital
to friends or family. A ‘net promoter’ score is
generated from their responses.
We have asked almost 2,000 parents and carers
and saw a rapid rise from an initial score of 52 to 81
in June 2012 where it has since stayed consistently
within the top quartile score of all acute trusts
across the NHS Midlands and East region.
But as we are a children’s hospital we want to find
out what children and young people think about our
hospital too, so in addition to parents and carers we
introduced a young person’s version of the question
at the same time. 97% of children and young
people ‘agree a bit’ or ‘agree a lot’ that they would
tell their friends and family that this was a good
hospital.
But no matter what we score on the Friends and
Family test we never stop doing all that we can to
improve the way we do things.
We want our patient experience programme
to provide mechanisms and processes
that enable every child and young
person, from all cultures and backgrounds, to tell
us in a way they want to about their experience
of the hospital and their care to influence future
development, design and delivery for all children
and young people. This is why we use a toolkit
approach which includes verbal feedback, mystery
shoppers, focus groups, email and text messaging,
feedback cards, patient experience walkabouts,
creative arts and much more.
Most importantly, it remains our objective to put the
child, young person and family at the heart of all
we do, ensuring that we listen to and respond to
what they are telling us. With that in mind we have
developed and launched our new Birmingham
Children’s Hospital Feedback app to make patient
and family feedback quicker, easier and more
effective than ever before.
The app is the first of its type in the NHS and
enables patients and families to interact with us
in an innovative new way and send their thoughts
and comments directly to the ward or area they
have visited with the simple click of a button.
The anonymous message goes straight to the
manager in charge so it can be addressed in realtime
and also goes unedited on our website so that
other people can benefit from reading it too.
The messages and comments from the app,
alongside our feedback cards, texts and emails,
is collated, reviewed and analysed to pick up any
emerging themes or issues that we need to take
action on.
Following a pilot on two of our wards, we have
rolled the app out across the Trust and have had
hundreds of messages through so far. The vast
majority have been positive, which is great as it’s
important that we celebrate a job well done by our
teams, but we’ve also had constructive feedback
about improvements that we can make too.
One parent used the app to let us know that the
lock on the toilet door was sticking and another
suggested some improvements we could make
to the disabled facilities on one of wards, which
is something we’re looking into as part of future
developments.