Jim’s blog: Understanding patient experience will help us improve integrated care
By Jim Austin, Chief Executive of Derbyshire Community Health Services Foundation Trust
The Derby and Derbyshire Integrated Care System is one of eight areas in England piloting a new survey to measure and help improve integrated care for patients.
Improving care for patients is the aim of every single one of us working in health and care.
In Derby and Derbyshire, we’re passionate about the improvements truly integrated care can make to patients’ lives.
When we get this right, it means only telling your story once, seeing the right person at the right time, having your records easily accessible by a range of professionals, eliminating unnecessary appointments or phone calls and many more.
Recently, we began piloting the new Integrated Care Experience Survey to measure, understand and improve patient experience.
The survey was a commitment from the NHS Long Term Plan and supports one of Derby and Derbyshire Integrated Care Board’s key purposes – to narrow inequalities in the experience of care.
Last year, we signed up to be one of just eight national frontrunners for the survey.
As a key partner in the Integrated Care System, Derbyshire Community Health Services wanted to take a lead role in this project and Tracy Allen, my predecessor, took on the role of senior responsible officer for the programme. I also believe this is fantastic work and intend to continue her legacy.
The voluntary survey was sent to a sample of 8,430 patients with complex health and care needs from 11 GP practices, who we know are often in contact with many services.
It asked them questions about the services they had accessed in the last six months, how they would rate them and their confidence in knowing which health or social care service to contact if they were worried about something, as well as many others.
We had an excellent response which will provide real time data on how services are working in a joined-up way from a patient and carer point of view.
There will also be opportunities to link this data with other data sets nationally and locally, taking us closer to being able to bring together data on experience, outcomes, access and service use.
The information collected is now being assessed and we are taking our time to understand how we can use this valuable source to improve our services.
It has also given us a great benchmark to look at the impact of improvements and service transformation over time.
We’re very grateful to all those stakeholders across the system who have helped us be part of such an exciting development.
This includes everyone from the patients and carers who took time to respond, to the primary care staff and system colleagues who helped ensure the roll-out. So much background work has made this possible.
Now, we’re committed to keeping the public up to date with what the data is telling us and how we will use it in the future.
As a system, we work hard to always put the patient first and the results of this survey will take us another step closer to providing even better integrated care for all.