Patient & Staff Experience
What is it?
Patient and staff involvement activities’ encompass a broad range of tasks done with patients and staff throughout quality improvement.
Why use it?
These activities can serve the purposes of:
Getting feedback on a system before, during and after changes to evaluate their success
Creating/refining change ideas
Ensuring a user-centric system is created
These activities also help to:
Reduce incorrect assumptions made by improvers
Increase investment from people who use and work with the system
Enhance service delivery
Influence patients and staff positively
How to use it?
The most suitable type of patient/staff involvement activity will depend on the project.
Teams can use more than one type of activity throughout a project.
The list below is not exhaustive and we welcome tips and suggestions from teams to add to our list.
Examples of patient/staff involvement activities:
Patient journey/walk through: plotting of experiences to understand the gaps, successes, and challenges in a health care journey. This is best done face to face with a patient
Shadowing a patient
Real time, on-the-spot feedback (verbal, voting, smiley-faces)
Patient representatives on your project team or regular link with Patient Participation Group
Patient representative present when creating a planning tool
Experience based co-design: an approach that allows staff and patients to work together to collaboratively design services and processes. Information can be found here
Patient questionnaires: a more traditional approach that works well when it has a clear and meaningful purpose
Patient feedback on documents: consider asking about the language used, whether all of content is relevant, whether there are other things they would like to know, whether they know what actions (if any) are required of them, whether the design is readable
Focus groups: a valuable tool when you have already done some initial investigation into the patient experience and want to dive deeper. A skilled facilitator can guide discussion around a topic with careful planning
Semi-structured interviews: similar to above, best used when initial investigation is complete
Patient and staff involvement activities can be done at all stages of a QI project. However, it can be beneficial to involve patients and staff as early as possible to best understand the experience and to avoid incorrect assumptions.
For support or more information in selecting or creating the best patient or staff involvement activity, please contact the team.
Helpful Resources
PATIENT EXPERIENCE COLLECTION TOOLS
Watch Liz Bream, Public Health Consultant, talk about the importance of collecting patient experience data.
PATIENT EXPERIENCE TEMPLATES AND EXAMPLES
KING'S FUND PATIENT AND FAMILY CENTRED TOOLKIT
External resource: A Patient Collaboration Toolkit created for cancer teams outlines a number of ways to involve patients. Of particular relevance are suggestions for quick ways to get patients involved from pages 6-8 of the toolkit.
Additional information can be found on the QI Lothian website. Click the button to the right.
‘Transforming patient experience’ is a comprehensive guide outlining how and why to improve patient care through collecting patient experience. Click the button on the right to download this guide