When a patient needs to be admitted to a Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust (KCHFT) community hospital, the trust aims to support their family and carers too, as best they can.
To help with this, the trust has produced a new carers’ information pack. These are given to those who provide a caring role to the patient at home.
The packs include useful information for carers, including details of how to access support services in Kent and Medway, general advice and guidance on carer well-being services.
They were co-designed with carers, carer champions, the trust’s Patient and Carer Partnership team and community hospital matrons to make sure they would be relevant, current and meet the carers’ needs.
This was a quality improvement (QI) project. As well as giving carers more support, the project aimed to gather more feedback from carers and families and to act upon this to improve services further, with a KCHFT ‘Giving Carers A Voice’ survey included in the contents. They contain a carer's assessment too, which sees if the carer might need any additional support.
Stakeholder mapping, a driver diagram and plan, do, study, act (PDSA) were used on this project.
Read more on the KCHFT QI Website