Happier Patients. Happier Team. Better Access
At Your Health Partnership (YHP) we are always working hard to make our service the best that it can be, balancing the needs of our patients, the needs of our team, and our contractual responsibilities.
By listening to you, our patients, we know that we have some work to do to make things better for the people that use our service.
In October, we invited over 4,500 patients to take part in group sessions so that we could listen to what they have to say - we feel that it was a really positive experience and something that we plan to do much more of in future.
YHP has 3 objectives for this year:
Improve the overall experience of our patients (Happier Patients)
Improve the overall experience of our staff (Happier Team)
Improve access to our services (Better Access)
Our patient group sessions focussed on 2 objectives; how can YHP improve access to our services and you can YHP make you, our patients, happier?
The thoughts, experiences and comments that you shared have helped us to identify three themes or ‘divers’ of dissatisfaction amongst the people that use our service.
Here is a summary of what we found:
Information and Feedback
We do not share enough information about our service and other services that patients can access directly.
We do not share enough information about how to access us; why we work the way that we do; information about our team - who’s who and what they do.
We need to involve our patients more often and seek their thoughts and opinions when making changes to the way that we work
Experience of contacting YHP
People wait too long on the phone to us.
Anima is a big source of frustration, from the availability to be able to submit requests, to how easy the system is to use.
The way we currently organise our appointments makes it harder for some people to be able to book appointments; people feel we need to make special arrangements for some individuals and groups whose circumstances make it harder for them to access help.
People are happier to wait for an appointment once they know they have one - it is the repeated contacts trying to make an appointment which causes the most frustration.
Some people cannot respond to links or questions that we ask digitally.
There should be a simple way for people to ask general (non-medical) questions.
Experience of the care we provide
We need to have a clear way to communicate test results.
We need to improve continuity of care so that people can see the same clinician for an ongoing problem.
We need a way to offer care to people who have been referred back to us by their hospital.
We need to improve the experience that people have in our waiting rooms e.g. the environment; confidentiality at reception desks; better communication from our Care Navigators; improved self-check-in.
Some of thing that people told us will take time and careful planning to improve and we are finishing a plan to take action which we will share with you as soon as we can. There are some changes that we have made already.
What have we done so far?
You told us that the waiting room at Regis Medical Centre (RMC) was dark and unwelcoming:
RMC has been redecorated throughout and we have replaced the broken lights in the waiting room.
We continue to look at all our waiting rooms to see how we can improve confidentiality.
You told us that the protective screen on the reception desk at Oakham Surgery makes it difficult for people to communicate confidentially:
The screen has now been replaced
You told us that people are fed-up with the long waits when contacting us by phone:
We have recruited more Care Navigators to fill our existing vacancies and are waiting for them to start.
We have upgraded our telephone system to introduce an option to press a button, hang-up and we will call you back when your position in the queue reaches the front - this will go live by the end of April 2024
We have launched a dedicated telephone number for patients on our Palliative Care Register so they can contact us directly without having to wait in the main call queue - this has received some really positive comments from patients.
With reference to improving access to our service:
We have been continuing to trial a number of different ways to organise the workload within our Triage Hub (the team that deal with all our our incoming requests through Anima) with the aim of making more requests available on any given day - this remains a work in progress but we are learning lots about what is and what isn’t possible with our current capacity.
In response to comments requesting to see clinicians face-to-face, we have reorganised our clinical sessions to offer more face-to-face appointments.
Review of the Anima system
Finally, we know that using the Anima platform is a big source of frustration for our patients and as such we are taking the opportunity to look at different systems that we might use - to be clear, the use of a digital platform to offer some form of ‘online consultation’ is a contractual requirement for all GP practices but there is a choice in what system a practice is able to use, and how they use it, provided that the chosen system meets certain standards.
We have invited the people who took part in our focus groups to test out some of the systems that are available, to help us to understand how user friendly they are from a patient perspective.
Again, we will let you know what we decide to do by the end of April.