01.04.13
App happy
Source: National Health Executive Mar/Apr 2013
Michelle McLoughlin, chief nurse at Birmingham Children’s Hospital, describes the benefits of a new way to collect feedback.
Allowing and encouraging patients to give feedback on their experience of the NHS is a vital part of identifying what trusts and individual departments and wards can do to improve their service.
Birmingham Children’s Hospital (BCH) has recently introduced a new way for patients and relatives to report on their care – a smartphone app.
NHE spoke to chief nurse Michelle McLoughlin about the importance of responding to the latest technology and providing a range of methods to compliment or criticise the hospital.
Keeping up with the kids
McLoughlin said first that, as a team at a children’s hospital, “we have young people that keep us on track and tell us how important technology is”.
Developing more modern ways of interacting with the hospital provides a “much more interesting way for them to give feedback on the care they’ve received,” she said. “They just don’t pick up the pens and paper – clearly they don’t use chalk and a board anymore, they use phones all the time. It’s part and parcel of their day-to-day.”
When asked how the hospital could improve, it was “really clear” that a technological solution would be key. The app is free to download from the app store and allows patients and relatives to comment on the care they have received.
The hospital wanted another tool to capture patient experience feedback and support better outcomes, and the app was developed by Digital Life Sciences, supported by NHS Midlands & East.
But the use of the app does not mean that more traditional methods of feedback could be eliminated, McLoughlin cautioned. “It’s never a replacement for face-to-face contact, or having those very important conversations.
“It’s about using the technology that’s out there to get feedback.”
Not just a gimmick
Taking the time to launch the new app was essential, McLoughlin said. “We wanted to be really clear that this wasn’t a gimmick; it’s only going to work if the families find it useful. Equally it’s only going to work if our staff see the value of it and find it useful.”
Staff have been trained in how best to teach others to download and use the app, as McLoughlin pointed out: “Just because you have a shiny iPhone, it doesn’t mean you necessarily know how to download an app.”
When first introduced, staff were “definitely wary of it”, although seeing feedback directly on screen was “a really powerful message”, she added.
“When things aren’t going well, it can be as simple as ‘the toilet door is broken’, and getting that fi xed in a short period of time because you now know about it, you see an immediate response. Once they worked with it and saw the value of it, it worked really well.”
Warts and all
McLoughlin said she would “absolutely” recommend the app for other trusts, with the particular benefit of feedback being anonymous, real-time and transparent.
The criteria for the new app were that it should be very easy to use, give feedback anonymously and quickly. Comments are all published on BCH’s website, apart from bad language, and showing patients the “warts and all” truth was very important for the hospital.
“You can’t get more transparent than that”, McLoughlin said. “People genuinely want to get it right. We’ve got 95% really positive feedback, but it’s the ones that aren’t so positive where we’ve got to listen and we’ve got to sort it out.
“It’s massively important.
“Sometimes people are really brave to say ‘this wasn’t quite right’, but unless they say it we’re never going to get it better. We really appreciate that they’ve taken the time and we will give a personal response to the person to say thank you and ‘this is what we’re going to do to make sure that we do get it right’.”
Too young
The Friends and Family Test, already in place in the Midlands and East and being rolled out nationally from April, presents certain issues for BCH, largely because of the average age of their patients. They currently ask the question to parents, and another test with simpler wording for children aged 10-18.
McLoughlin commented: “[Children’s opinions] are black and white; they don’t do any of this in the grey. Either you do recommend it to a young person, or you don’t, or you’re in the middle. There’s none of this fi ve gradients, they’re much more basic.”
The new regulations will require the hospital to ask the specifi c Friends and Family test to patients, not parents – but only from the age of 16 upwards.
BCH sees a maximum of 35 over-16 year olds a month. Although the test works well for adults – the majority of the population in hospitals – it cannot yet adequately capture this data for younger people.
McLoughlin said: “It’s not going to be a useful tool for us. At the moment from a national perspective it’s not sophisticated enough to pick up children and young people, which is really sad.”
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