Gathering Evidence

This is a short guest blog by Alex Hannaford, Chief executive at Healthwatch Bucks. Here Alex describes the partnership between HW Bucks and ourselves and how it used to gather evidence around the patient experience in Buckinghamshire.

Alex asks what else can we do to encourage patients and service users to feedback about their experiences and increase the involvement of service providers talking to their customers and building services around the customer journey?  

A crucial part of Healthwatch Bucks’ aim to influence the delivery of Health and Social care services in Buckinghamshire is the ability to present evidence based recommendations.  To assist us in gathering evidence about patients’ experience of health service and to capture individual stories, Healthwatch Bucks has partnered with Patient Opinion, the UK's leading independent non-profit feedback platform for health services. It enables people to share their story or experiences of using the Health and Social Care system.

Each story received by Patient Opinion is sent by its moderators to the staff or group involved in the service who may reply to the person direct or take appropriate action in response.

We introduced the Patient Opinion survey in September 2013 on our website in September 2013 so people could easily access the service via our Speak Out tab. In the past year 167 stories from people in Buckinghamshire have been posted to Patient Opinion.

The numbers of stories posted was evenly split between Aylesbury Vale Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) (84) and Chiltern CCG (83)

Of the 167 stories posted about hospitals, about three-quarters  were positive

•             84 were about Stoke Mandeville Hospital of which 74% were positive.

•             83 were about High Wycombe Hospital of which 81% were positive.

Other stories document frustrations around communications and administration in particular and there are stories of negative experiences.

Data has been used to report to the regional Quality Surveillance Group, to feed into the CQC inspections of our local hospitals, and to feed into the work of groups that look at specific services.  Going forward, this data will be looked at alongside other data that Healthwatch Bucks collects to identify the main trends and issues to enable us to prioritise activities.”

We would be interested to hear from other local Healthwatches about their efforts to collect data, but also in how they encourage open engagement between providers and customers on a public platform. 

Thanks.