My name is Pete Murphy and I am immensely proud to have been the Chief Nurse here at East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust since March 2023.
I have been a nurse since I completed my training in 1991 and although I have held lots of different roles across a number of organisations in the NHS, I have not yet had the pleasure of doing a guest blog.
So, when I was asked I jumped at the chance, so here goes.
I have worked hard to get out and about across the Trust and meet as many colleagues as possible across all disciplines and professions and not just nursing. I believe to be successful requires a team effort and that is what I see and hear every day in ELHT when I am out and about.
I hope that colleagues who know me or have met me recognise that I am supremely passionate about ensuring both patients and staff receive the best possible care and experience as they access services and so for this reason I want to use my blog today to talk about the new Patient Experience Strategy I have been working on with the team. You can read it here.
Earlier this month we launched the new strategy with two separate sessions and, although I would have ordinarily preferred to see and speak to people in person, I was beyond pleased on this occasion to have to move online because more than 150 colleagues wanted to come along and we didn’t have a room large enough!
During the sessions I was able to share my thoughts on the new strategy and the ambitious targets that we have set ourselves and agreed to measure.
Patient experience is such an important aspect of our lives as health care professionals and, indeed, as human. I’m beyond proud to note that feedback, data and statistics suggest that around 99 per cent of our interactions with patients are generally very positive and have a significantly positive impact, however we also receive complaints about things that we can do better and listening actively to this feedback is one of the most important priorities for the Trust.
The strategy has been designed with colleagues and patients and their representatives and within it we have placed great emphasis on supporting the needs of our most vulnerable patients. These include patients with learning disabilities, cognitive impairment (dementia) and children and young people.
I would like to personally thank all colleagues who have supported its development, I place great emphasis on co-design and seeing our services through the lens of both patients and the teams on the ground. As part of our Governance processes we have presented the strategy to both the Trust Quality Committee and also the Board of Directors who have approved it and will be monitoring it during our Board meetings.
One of the most important elements of our strategy is ensuring that we actively listen to patients and their families and an important part of this is our Call for Concern Helpline developed nationally by the NHS following the death of Martha Mills, a 13-year-old child who died after she developed sepsis following a pancreatic injury.
A coroner ruled that Martha would most likely have survived if doctors had moved her to intensive care earlier and listened to her mother’s concerns. Therefore our helpline is available 24/7 for worried patients and their families to raise concerns and seek an independent second opinion. This can, if not resolved, be escalated to myself as Chief Nurse or Jawad Husain as Medical Director for the Trust.
The strategy has a number of measures that we have agreed, these are linked to how patients perceive us. The key aim is that we are rated in the top 20% of NHS Trusts for overall experience. It is a bold ambition but I know that we can and will succeed.
If we consider the results from the National In-Patient survey from the year 2023-24 we rank as average across the majority of the questions compared to the rest of the NHS, where we are statistically worse, is around the domain of ‘Doctors’ and ‘Overall Experience’.
Now this survey comes with significant caveats, it is a very small sample size circa 400 respondents and was undertaken around the time our new and comprehensive Electronic Patient Record had launched and was being rolled out.
However I know we are a very proud organisation and would not wish to be associated with patients ranking us lower than our peers. So we will be building a measurement strategy that allows for all departments to be able to see their data on a monthly basis and learn from what is being fed back.
An added expectation is that we will actively listen to our service users and use their feedback in two ways. Firstly to celebrate all the fantastic feedback we receive and develop a best practice guide that we can all share and, secondly, to also listen to those areas where we can improve and adopt a monthly ‘you said, we did’ approach.
I am confident that all colleagues will support this strategy and get involved. There is clear evidence that patients who receive high standards of care (Safe , Personal and Effective) provide positive feedback.
Positive feedback in return is strongly associated with positive well being of staff. In addition in these most challenging times where we as a Trust alongside the wider NHS are faced with so many competing challenges that this will bring some positivity to us all and even dare I say it ‘fun’ into our working day.
So that’s it from me, thanks for taking the time to read and I do hope you can all get involved.
Pete
Pete Murphy, Chief Nurse