News

News

A better experience for our patients

nurse and patient

Nurse and patient

Patients at Queen’s and King George hospitals have said they are receiving better care – including smoother discharges and tastier meals!

The feedback is from the results of this year’s National Adult Inpatient Survey, run by the Care Quality Commission, which were published this week (Wednesday 13 June).

Our patients said they were having a better experience overall – with improvements across around half of the areas surveyed.

Areas seeing significant improvement included when they are sent home from hospital, with them being given more notice, experiencing fewer delays and feeling more involved in the decision to discharge them from hospital.

Big improvements were also seen in our hospital food, with patients rating it much more highly, and feeling they had enough help to eat it, compared to last year’s survey. This could be due to our introducing protected mealtimes, preventing all but essential procedures during mealtimes, the introduction of mealtime assistants, volunteers who help them to eat their food, and new menus.

Patients also praised how it was made much easier to give feedback on their care, and how they were encouraged to do so.

Our Chief Nurse Kathryn Halford said: “I’m really pleased to see lots of improvement in this year’s results, especially in areas which we’ve particularly focused on followed previous feedback from our patients, such as mealtimes and when they’re sent home from our hospitals.

“As always, surveys like this give us an opportunity to see where we’re doing well, and also where our patients would like us to focus next. Therefore, we’ll be looking closely at all feedback and putting in place actions plans to address all areas where we need to continue to improve.”

Only a handful of areas in the annual survey had gotten worse following last year’s results. One area where patients would like to see improvement is to have the purpose of medicines they are prescribed explained to them more clearly.

This is something we’re already focusing on as part of the National Patient Experience Collaboration. Patient feedback had showed medicines as an area they would like better communication so there are eight pilot wards trialing improvements in this area, which are already seeing results.

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