Patient Panel
To be truly committed to designing and delivering patient centred care and patient centred services we recognised that we needed to refocus from ‘doing to’ and ‘doing for’ to ‘doing with’ our patients and public; a codesign model; this brought about a need to think differently about how we ensure our patients are genuinely involved in service design, improvement, development and evaluation.
Embedded as a Trust strategic objective within our 5-year Integrated Improvement Plan we set out to ‘Redesign our communication and engagement approaches to broaden and maximise involvement with patients and carers’ and two elements within this have been the development of our Patient Panel and establishing expert reference groups for specialist areas.
We wanted our patients to be proactively involved in Trust developments and improvements through receiving, reviewing, commenting, challenging and involvement in proposals so that those individual but sometimes lone voices could collectively be louder. Strategically we have been nurturing a culture of patient engagement to ensure patient voices are sought out, listened to and incorporated in all that we do.
We have masses of patient experience data, primarily ‘feedback’ that is information about the reaction of experiencing care and we use this as a basis for improvement. We have a number of local / specialty engagement events such as patient forums or focus groups and bespoke surveys….again largely ‘feedback’. What was missing was that earlier involvement and patients experiences being continuously considered and our patient panel and expert reference groups have been developed to achieve just that.
Our panel and group members are critical friends, experts by their own experiences, they have voices that are collectively louder and stronger and they can influence and contribute to discussions and decisions.
Since launching Patient Panel in September 2020 we have continued to meet monthly and have only missed 3 meetings during that time. There have been 90 different presentations and discussions on topics ranging from outpatient letters and appointment scheduling through to EMRAD services, developments in dermatology, protected mealtimes and Patient Safety Culture.
Standalone codesign workshops have also been held on topics such as Uniform Policy, Patient Moves and the Visiting Policy and a number of members played key roles in our Trustwide Signage Audit undertaking over 150 individual mapping journeys.
Alongside this a number of short life and more substantive expert reference groups have been developed including:
• Sensory Loss – 5 members – codesigned bedside sensory loss symbols & new policy for supporting patients with assistance dogs.
• Breast Mastalgia – 5 members – co designed a new pathway for patients suffering with breast pain.
• Cancer Patients Expert Reference Group – 8 members; commissioned by Lincolnshire Cancer Board.
• Dementia Carers – 5 members – supported by our dementia specialist nurse.
• Patient Improvement Advisory - Group supporting the Improvement Academy – 8 members
• Digital Transformation – a new group to be the voice of patients as we journey through our digital transformation.
We have 33 members of the main Patient Panel and average 18-19 members at each monthly meeting which is testimony to its success.
You can read and download the whole project paper, and the demonstrable service improvements made as a result of Panel panels HERE