The reason we are so committed to engaging with our patients to gain their feedback is to ensure that our services are accessible and inclusive to everyone who needs them. By listening to our patients and sharing in their experiences we can make real, sustainable changes to our services which truly reflect patient need. 

A key part of our engagement agenda is to make sure that we collect views and feedback from everyone, even those who may be hard to reach, in order to get a true representation of how our services are delivering and ensure that every individual has an opportunity to have their say. There’s no doubt that this is a challenge but, by employing a variety of methods to capture feedback, we believe we are able to listen to most individuals thoughts, opinions and views.

By ensuring we are listening to our patients we can empower them to improve and own their services; this leads to more effective, needs led services which are fully inclusive and built to deliver an excellent the patient experience.

We recognise that a single approach to patient engagement does not allow us to capture all patient voices, thoughts or comments which is why we regularly trial and test new methods to engage a greater number of diverse patients. 

We ensure we capture feedback from an extensive patient and public base through:

Our annual patient survey
Our on-line and on-site friends and family test
Our comments, complaints and compliments cards
Our patient text messaging service MJOG
Question of the month token boxes.

Alongside this we run active groups of patient members including:

Patient Participation
Virtual User Groups
Service User Groups (PPSUG)
Patient Reader Group
Project specific focus groups.

A key element to our patient engagement is ensuring that we show what a difference this has made to our services.

Field House Surgery | Bridlington | Patient Survey
When collating the responses from the Field House annual survey and Patient Participation Group (PPG) feedback it became apparent that there were some concerns around access to appointments which appropriatly met patient need. The surgery had been working on a model where patients were required to call the surgery to try and get a same day appointment on a first come, first served basis.  As part of discussions with the PPG and from the feedback we developed and adopted a new model which is now based on clinical need and accessibility. We worked with the team to introduced a new system of pre-bookable appointments and also implemented drop in clinics for our registered patients on a Tuesday and Thursday to make clinic more accessible to those who has a short notice or urgent need. This model is now well established and the team is now exploring more innovative ways in which they can make sure that patients are recieving the right care, first time. 

Hilton Road Surgery | Leeds | Support and Advice Hub
One of our Hilton Road patients attended an appointment at The Light Surgery, Leeds and was very interested in accessing our Support and Advice Hub which is tailored towards helping patients access the most appropriate care for their need. They were so impressed with the concept that they asked if this service could be replicated in the Hilton Road Surgery so we used our patient messaging service to ask our patients what they though. We asked "Would patients like and use information on health education, self care and improving their health and wellbeing". An overwhelming 92% of patients who responded where in favour of establishing a resource so Hilton Road will soon be getting it's very own Support and Advice Hub which will offer bookable sessions, tablet based access to resources and leaflets.

The Light Surgery | Leeds | Wifi Access
From the question of the month at The Light Surgery, Leeds it was asked if patients wished for wifi within the waiting area.  The results came in and patients had voted in favour to having wifi access whilst they waited.

Our Patient Advisers will use this service to show patients on their own devices health and wellbeing sites that they can then use at home to identify their condition and the appropriate course of action.
The wifi service will be provided by The Cloud, this will ensure that all appropriate governance arrangements are in place, patients are protected and so is our own infrastructure.  We look to go fully live in June with this service.