What complaints and compliments can teach us

Generic survey icon

Patient feedback, whether it's a complaint or compliment, is crucial to organisational learning and improving patient care and outcomes.

When it comes to feedback, the CQC focus on several areas, including:

  • Ensuring people are treated with kindness, respect, and compassion and that they are given emotional support when needed.
  • Ensuring the service supports people to express their views and be actively involved in making decisions about their care, treatment, and support.
  • Ensuing the respect and promotion of people’s dignity and respect.
  • Ensuring people’s concerns and complaints are listened and responded to, with feedback used to improve the quality of care.

What were the problems?
In their 2019 report, the CQC highlighted that we took too long to investigate or close complaints, with patients often waiting excessive times for a resolution. Complaint and concern investigations were often completed later than the reported timescale, with responses lacking empathy and compassion, and feedback methods for patients were not always accessible or user friendly. In addition, feedback received through complaints, surveys, engagement, and patient safety was not consistently coordinated, and key themes/areas for improvement and learning were not always identified.

In 2020, the CQC told us we must put oversight and governance arrangements in place to ensure complaints are appropriately investigated and identified as possible serious incidents.

What have we done about it?
Our new complaints policy (implemented in April 2021) includes complexity grading, with investigation and response timescales mutually agreed with the reporter. Weekly tracking meetings ensure monitoring and compliance and learning from complaints is now mandatory and reported weekly, monthly, and bimonthly. Guidance around the process has also been created for local teams along with coaching and training about developing quality and learning outcomes.

Patient experience feedback continues to be overwhelmingly positive, survey satisfaction results remain high, and the average compliments/complaints ratio remains at 3:1. Weekly patient experience (PE) management meetings and quarterly Patient Experience and Engagement Group (PEEG) meetings are now in place to share information and learning, and to identify themes and priorities (such as delays, non-conveyance/non-attendance and lessons learned). A new Patient Experience Improvement Manager role has been created working alongside the Patient Safety Improvement Specialist, across the PE and Patient Safety teams to strengthen links with patient safety and ensure patient feedback and patient safety incidents are triangulated, with lessons learned and structured actions in place and monitored.

Over the past year, the PE teams have begun to work with external providers to improve the accessibility to the complaints process and patient surveys have been reviewed to be more user friendly. The core PE surveys are all now available online in different formats including Browsealoud which reads text aloud to users.  

The PE teams are working with our patients, the public, stakeholders, and external organisations and undertaking bespoke survey projects around patient experience and engagement.

Our new Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) Strategy
Our new strategy has recently been co-produced with our patients and public and includes five key areas which the group felt were important: Ethos, Involvement and Engagement, Accessibility, Communication and Networking. More information about the strategy is below, there are also plans in place to nominate it for a national award.

 

What’s next?
Listening and promoting the patient voice is crucial in enabling us to identify what is working well but also to highlight areas for improvement.

We will continue to focus on monitoring the complaints policy, with closer communication and agreed timescales. Following this year’s empathy training, further training, support, and coaching is planned to ensure compassionate, honest, and open investigation responses.

The new PPI Strategy will feed into the PE workstreams going forward, and the weekly PE management and complaints tracking meetings will continue to monitor compliance. Lessons learned and actions taken will be shared and patient feedback will be actively communicated, with a second Patient Voice Webinar planned.

The PE teams will continue to create closer connections with patients, external organisations, stakeholders and ‘Experts by Experience’ in relation to PE and engagement projects, following the success of the co-production work. The core and bespoke survey projects will continue along with the trialling of new feedback methods. Additional work is needed to improve accessibility to the complaints and concerns process, with plans for PE information and surveys to be made available in ‘easy read’ formats.

For more information relating to patient experience please visit:

http://east24/Clinical/patient-experience-2.htm

https://www.eastamb.nhs.uk/about-us/patient-survey-results.htm