Patient involvement key to preserving hospital care

The trust was awarded as ‘Good’ by the Care Quality Commission for 2018, a vast improvement on its ‘Requiring Improvement’ rating from 2015.

It also received ‘Outstanding’ overall for its care, and now it wants to involve patients in order to become a leader in transforming local health and care and preserve this record.

Discussing the idea at a board of directors meeting, head of communications Kerry Beadling-Barron put forward a plan to involve “more than 90 per cent of patients in the planning and delivery of their care”.

She said: “The key thing is that we want to involve patients in our future decision making before we have officially made the decision.

“In the past we have made a decision and then told patients once this has been implemented, but now as we move forward with the CQC rating we would welcome a lot more patient feedback.

“Patients can give valuable information from a different perspective on how care can be improved and maintained, and whether they think decisions we are making are both wise and beneficial.

“We have already started setting up measures on our Care Committee in which we have a member of the public sitting on the board, and we want to increase this involvement over the next year.”

The aim of the scheme is to have more than 90 per cent of patients involved in the planning of care by the final quarter of 2019-2020, as well as introducing service plans that are co-designed with patients and service users by 2021.

This will be done through working closer with the Better Together Alliance - a program which lobbies for the continued alliance of health and social care - as well as by analysing patient experience frameworks already in place.