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At Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust we welcome all feedback relating to concerns, whether it be via a complaint, a comment made on a survey or brought to our attention in another way. Feedback from our patients, their families, carers or friends helps us to make improvements to the services we provide.
Here are some examples of what you said and what we did to make improvements:
"There are very long waiting times from referral, for children to be seen by the service."
Changes have been made to the therapy offered, with a focus on fewer sessions offered at a time and aimed at upskilling families to support their children’s communication development at home. This will enable the service to identify those children who will benefit from more intensive direct therapy and in turn be seen more quickly.
"There are long waiting times for appointments."
To help reduce the length of waiting times, the service recruited five dietitians to undertake virtual appointments.
"Parents would like face-to-face appointments for their children."
The service is gradually opening up face to face availability and will be offering these appointments where needed.
"It would be helpful to provide group webinar education sessions in the afternoon, to accommodate patients who find the mornings difficult due to their level of pain."
The service reviewed the times of the webinars and now offer patients the choice to attend a morning or afternoon session.
"Patients and their family members felt they could be involved more in decisions about care and treatment."
To raise awareness of the importance of involving patients and their relatives, staff undertook relevant training.
"Clinicians were unintentionally causing offense when broaching the subject of body weight."
Staff received training from healthy weight specialists, to gain guidance on how best to sensitively discuss body weight and weight loss with patients.
"Some confirmation letters were not arriving prior to the patient's appointment and this meant they did not have all the information they needed."
The service has introduced a 'contact us' appointment booking system. This entails patients contacting the service to book an appointment and is followed-up with confirmation by email.
"It was difficult for parents to find the specific service form on the website that they needed to complete."
The whole of the service website was revamped and direct links to the relevant forms are now sent to parents, in replace of the generic page link.
"It is a very long wait for the next appointment, following the initial consultation within a prison setting."
Extra sessions were provided, to help reduce the waiting times for patients to be seen.
"A parent attending a workshop felt questions about female genital mutilation (FGM) were inappropriate for that particular session."
For future workshops, the service added a framed question about FGM and produced guidance for staff to assist with parental questioning.
"There was a misunderstanding about the reception-aged programmes being opt-out rather than consent being required."
In preparation for next year, the service amended the parent/carer letter, to include clear explanation that the programmes are opt-out and details on how to do so if required.
"The process and content of group webinars for parents could be improved."
Changes made:
Parents are now given an option at triage to proceed straight to webinar without an initial assessment.
Prior to webinar, assessment has been amended to check understanding of webinar and foundations of sleep.
Content of webinars re-written as the foundations to frame healthy sleep.
Clear options are provided on webinar and by staff on how to access more support.
Taking questions from parents during a webinar is being trialled.
The pack provided following a webinar has been renewed; a copy of webinar and clear discharge letter with links and instructions on how to access more support.
"The health visitors were not always able to provide tongue-tie scores to parents."
The infant feeding team are documenting the scores on a part of the patient record system that is easy accessible for health visitors. A new page has been created for the Red book, for staff to insert with the assessment, giving mothers a record of their consultation.
"When triaged, the next appointment was made with the incorrect clinician."
The staff undertaking triage now have access to a team’s chat group, so they gain instant advice from each other, if needed, to ensure patients are placed on the correct pathway and booked in to see the right clinician.
"There was some misunderstanding over treatment provided, as some patients thought all their issues would be addressed during one appointment."
As the service can only address one issue per referral, to help expectations being met at appointments, the self-referral form was updated to advise patients with multiple issues to request treatment for the one thing that affects them the most.
"Clinicians do not apply cream to patient's feet following the removal of callus/hard skin and some people have difficulties bending down to do this themselves at home."
Clinicians now apply emollient to feet during appointments and continue to ask patients to apply themselves at home, to reduce the risk of wounds. If patients express they have difficulties bending down to apply themselves, clinicians suggest ways to help them use the cream.
"There was lack of communication with a parent regarding additional triage required for their child, prior to a vaccination. As a result, the child was unable to receive their vaccination when they attended their appointment and therefore had a wasted journey with their parent."
A process was put in place, whereby when additional triage is required for a child and staff have been unable to speak with a parent before a scheduled session, they will ask schools to make a final call to the parent on the day of the vaccination.