A real time focus on improving patient experience, boosted by investment from the board has seen Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust jump from 111th in the country to 10th in just six years. Winner of the CHKS patient experience award, the trust focusses on being able to make immediate change when something is wrong, combined with supporting staff to do the best they can.
With the use of real time monitoring of data, it allows the trust to make change straight away, if patients tell them that something is not right. It helps the board to manage and deal with any problems as they arise and also helps the staff to fully engage. The trust started looking at patient experience in 2009 and by 2010 had established a real time programme which now sees more than 700 patients a month being interviewed while they are still in hospital.
The trust also interviews people once they have left hospital and have found that those who have been at home for a couple of weeks are more likely to give a frank and warts and all account of the hospital performance.
Secret of success:
-
Standards are set on what is measured. These are based on what the trust knows matters to patients.
-
If any ward slips below 90 per cent an alert is triggered. Information from a number of sources can indicate whether this is just a blip or a consistent problem where a team may be in need of extra support.
-
Teams understand their own data and have information about how they are doing.
-
To ensure surveys are robust and reliable the trust uses a large information supply to measure every month. The differences between specialties are based on the views of thousands of patients. The week-to-week ward surveys are small, but makes sure that more than half of the patients on each ward are included.
Annie Laverty, director of patient experience says: “When we introduced this we sat down with consultants and asked them what we could do that would make them trust the data. They said it had to be carried out by a third party and that the data should be benchmarked against national performance.”
Using the benchmarked results, the board can see that meaningful changes are being made, but it can also help to flag up where improvement needs to be made. The 2014 annual results showed that the noise at night figures were not good. The demographic showed that the trust had an older generation profile, which could mean that some patients with dementia were more frightened at night. Instead of using this as an excuse for justification, the trust used it to work from to make improvements and now scores are 16 per cent better.
Although the surveys were designed around the things that patients cared about, staff soon began to see that they had a natural ally in their patients as patients also notice everything that they do well. Annie says: “Staff naturally worry about the process because it is looking at their ward and judging what patients think of them, but we are not there to trip them up.
“We show them that we are asking the questions that make sense to them as care providers. We show them the way that we will be scoring it.”
The organisation now makes time every month to see what is good and what patients want to talk about. Annie says: “The more transparent we are the faster we get better. Keeping it open is really important. If we were to take it away now I believe our staff would be unhappy.”
