Using feedback to reinforce changes at the Cardiac Assessment Hub

Care Opinion provides another opportunity for patients, carers, and families to share their experiences of health and social care within the Western Trust. The feedback goes directly to the appropriate staff in the identified locations so that they can respond. The public will be able to see how their feedback can make real changes.

We asked Andrew Fleming, Chest Pain Assessment Nurse, Altnagelvin Hospital to talk about the benefits of Care Opinion to our services in this short video.

You can see all the feedback about the Cardiac Assessment Hub and responses here. There is also a transcript of the video below.

Thank you Andrew for sharing your thoughts.

Video Transcript

My name is Andrew Fleming and I am a nurse based in the Cardiology Assessment Hub in Altnagelvin Hospital.

The hub is a relatively new service that started just after Easter of this year, and in May we started using Care Opinion to help us get feedback and develop the service that we’re providing for patients and clients.

Care Opinion is a good service that allows a non-influenced opinion from our patients or clients and they are safe to do that from their own home.

The feedback given to us has helped us to develop the service further and reinforce some of the changes that we’ve made to a previous service and allow the changes to be made.

As a team, we take great pride and we are proud whenever our colleagues are mentioned personally in the feedback given. We share this with them, and we also publish or print out the feedback and it is put on a noticeboard that we’ve developed in our patient reading area so other patients can also see the feedback given and hopefully encourage them to respond as well.

To date, we’ve had no negative feedback. We have had one piece of feedback which has resulted in a change in the way that we manage our service. It was around waiting times, and we were able to go forward and identify changes that could be made to help speed up the return of results.  We are also looking at point of care systems which will also benefit the patient and help with a quicker return of results.

Feedback given also helps us with our professional registration and can be used going forward in our portfolios.