Wednesday 21 July 2010

Embed direct feedback into the system

It’s very flattering when iWantGreatCare gets mentioned in high places and by those who really understand and care passionately about caring for patients.

It’s even more exciting to know that the work the team does, and the way in which iWantGreatCare works together with doctors, nurses and other health professionals, is enabling colleagues to improve what they do on a day to day basis. This is of course the vision of iWantGreatCare - to harness patient experience to drive up quality of healthcare.

Thus being mentioned in the House of Lords recently, counted as a great moment for the small team here and another step on the way to realising our aspirations:

On incentives, we should remember that healthcare professionals are proud. They want to deliver a good service. If you embed direct patient feedback into the system, as we have in Wales for palliative care using iWantGreatCare, it can become a powerful driver to quality improvement. One team does not want to perform less well than another, but patients need to provide feedback in an anonymised way so that they are not fearful that their comments might antagonise the clinicians looking after them.
If you are a patient or carer and wish to help improve the quality of care you (or others) receive, simply go to the iWantGreatCare.org website now and add a review about care you’ve received. It makes a difference.



Putting patients in the driving seat works

Gosh, it’s been an incredibly busy few weeks.
So much for a summer-break, the iWantGreatCare team has been fully occupied helping our existing clients realise all the benefits of real-time, direct patient experience.

One of the fascinating things about enabling organisations to harness patient experience as an outcome metric, is how rapidly it becomes an essential and powerful tool affecting so much of what they do, and how they do it “from ward to board”. This is exciting and satisfying - sort of like letting a genie out of the bottle, but with every one winning (not just the person who gets to make the wish!).

In addition to the Health Secretary Andrew Lansley once again naming iWantGreatCare as an example of patient-centric outcomes which “put patients in the driving seat”, the Department of Health have released their Outcomes document and Health White Paper.

All those who are passionate about high quality care and patients getting the very best treatment, will be delighted by the new focus on outcomes. Most importantly, the measures to be used include those that are reported directly by patients (including experience ratings at a highly detailed level).

This shift from targets to outcomes is long overdue and - if done properly - will benefit every single user and employee of the NHS.

Exciting times.

 

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