Patient Transport Service – SMS pilot for Patient Experience

Listening to the patient voice is crucial to highlight areas of excellence but also to improve the services provided. At EEAST, patient feedback is received through various channels, including: compliments, complaints, discovery interviews and surveys.

The Trust’s patient survey programme includes continuous surveys for Emergency Service (ES) and the Patient Transport Service (PTS), with survey signposting undertaken via patient information cards, social media, and invitation to feedback letters.

In addition to the current signposting methods, a four-month SMS survey pilot is planned for patients who have used the PTS within the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough area. The pilot will go ‘live’ on the 25^th of September 2023, with 1,000 SMS messages sent every month to a random sample of patients, inviting them to feedback on their experience via the link to the online survey. Following the pilot review, the SMS survey will be rolled out to the remaining PTS contract areas. All surveys will continue to remain available in alternative formats, including an EasyRead option.

The benefits of using SMS as a signposting method include:

Increased number of survey submissions and valuable feedback.
Ability to better collate real time feedback.
Adopting different methodologies to proactively ensure the patient voice.
To reduce the reliance on paper, embracing the Trust’s Digital Strategy.

The feedback received through patients is overwhelmingly positive and we want to ensure that we are capturing more of this wonderful feedback for our staff, but we cannot achieve this without your support. If you have any questions or would like any further information relating to the pilot project, please contact the Patient Survey Team either by email: surveys@eastamb.nhs.uk or telephone: 01603 422757.

Thank you for your continued support to ensure the patient voice is heard.

Published 11th September 2023