Make every moment matter

At John Taylor Hospice all our staff are dedicated to making a difference for the people we care for, their friends and their family.

Based in Birmingham, for more than 100 years we have provided palliative and end of life care – we’re there for families when they need us most.

Death and dying can be frightening but with care, pain management, dignity and comfort our staff do all they can to support people at this time both in the hospice and in people’s homes.

Our aim is to make every moment matter – that’s what our logo says and that is what we aim to do.

But how do we know that we are succeeding? People we care for, their friends and families often want to tell us how much we helped. They frequently do so with cards, with letters, with personal thanks.

But we also want to know where we might not have got things just quite right or where we could have done something better. And people are a lot less willing to tell us that.

Which is why we joined Patient Opinion. The experience of our patients and their loved ones matters to us. We want to know if we can improve our care.

We’re keen to encourage people to share their experiences on Patient Opinion. Our staff give the forms to families, the forms are on hand in reception for anyone to take away and we put up posters including the phone number.

For Patient Opinion to work we need staff behind it so we’ve kept up a steady stream of communication to ensure everybody understands the significance. That means attending team meetings with the leaflets in hand, it means featuring Patient Opinion at our monthly staff mix and mingles, it means frequently talking about it in our weekly newsletters – and it means having a notice board packed full of people’s latest comments so staff can see what they are saying about us.

There’s still work to do. At any one time more than 600 people are receiving the care they need from John Taylor Hospice so there are many families who have yet to share their experiences on Patient Opinion.

Some never will – there will always be people who prefer to write a personal card or come in and say hello, we know that. But hopefully as we continue to share awareness of Patient Opinion and encourage people to tell us about their experience at the hospice – whatever that experience is – we will see more and more families finding this a useful tool.

We are committed to improving our service and Patient Opinion is only one of the many mechanisms we have in place for encouraging feedback from patients and their families. And by learning from their experiences we can work even harder to make every moment matter for everyone we care for.

If you would like to know more about John Taylor Hospice please click on www.johntaylorhospice.org.uk