Introduction
Patients are the cornerstone of healthcare, and understanding the experience they have is a fundamental to the delivery of quality care.1 The NHS patient safety strategy advocates the involvement of patients in improving the quality of care in the NHS with the use of patient safety partners. The implementation of patient safety partners ensures that patients are ‘empowered to play an active role in patient safety’.2 In addition, the sharing of patient experiences can be a valuable learning tool for staff working within a healthcare organisation.
There are a number of ways in which patients can feed back to a healthcare organisation, but the effectiveness of these modes of engagement being relayed back to the staff working on the clinical floor is variable. We felt that this was a missed opportunity for sharing the patient experience with all relevant staff and, in turn, allowing people to learn through reflection on how our actions as healthcare professionals impact on the overall patient experience.
Method
We have developed a patient story pathway, which involves allowing patients and relatives the opportunity to provide a video account of the experience of the care they received in our hospital. We encouraged patients and relatives to share all aspects of their experience, both positive and negative, so that the true patient-lived experience can be appreciated by the healthcare audience. The experiences are shared in a video format, either filmed by the patient in their own environment or by us in the hospital setting. Videos are subsequently reviewed and edited to produce a short 5–6-minute patient story, which we feel is an appropriate length of time to maintain audience engagement.
We have developed the pathway to provide guidance on how to start the patient story process, appropriate time frames and essential checkpoints which need to be met, along with a timely follow-up procedure.
Results
We have shared a number of videos, both at a local trust conference and at our regular public trust board meetings. The feedback we have received from staff is promising – they appreciate the opportunity to understand how micro-interactions impact on the patient experience. In addition, patients welcome the opportunity to share their experience so that others can reflect and learn from it as a way of giving back.
Conclusion
There is clear evidence to suggest that engaging patients and utilising patient feedback to measure outcomes is an effective way to support an improved patient experience.3 Furthermore, when the patient has a positive experience in healthcare, there is evidence to suggest this leads to improved outcomes for them and improved satisfaction for staff.1 We believe that sharing patient stories can be utilised in this way. As our patient story pathway develops, we hope to share patient experiences more widely and potentially to more focused audiences. In addition, we would like to look at ways to share patient stories as part of ‘lessons learnt’ training.
- © Royal College of Physicians 2022. All rights reserved.
Related Articles
Cited By...
- No citing articles found.