Involvement Partner Jaydee gives his account of being involved with the Patient and Carer Information Group
The Involvement, Experience and Volunteering team host a weekly Patient and Carer Information Group where we invite people who have experience of our services to meet and review and co-design literature that is produced by the Trust to give information about health related matters.
There are four strands to this group (Review of Trust documents for patients, Collaborative model redesign, Carer Information and Digital information), and each strand meets once every four weeks on a Tuesday morning in person at our IEV Hub in Mapperley as well as online.
One of those who attends weekly is Jaydee who below, shares his account of our weekly Patient and Carer Information Group meeting. Jaydee attended on Tuesday 5th July where the discussion was around the Trust Improvement plan.
Well, today was a very interesting day. We had a new member join us for discussion and it’s always nice to see our bunch growing in size. They sometimes say ‘the more the merrier!’, and that is definitely the case in this instance, not less because we all had something positive to contribute. It seems as though as a group we are all becoming savvy and adept at critiquing the documents set before us each week. So much so that it often leaves a good few minutes for us to go off piste and delve, with respect, into each other’s personal lives. It’s that informal here at the Patient and Carer Information Group.
On a personally reflective note, I had a little trouble keeping up with some of the lingo or ‘NHS speak’ battered around the room, however, after a little while longer attending the sessions with Lyndsy and the team, I’m sure that I’ll pick up on some of the more commonly used terminology.
This morning we looked at a simplified overview of ‘The Big Plan’ - an intended remedial measure for the improvement of the care patients receive as service users within the sphere of Nottinghamshire Health Care. Great emphasis was placed on the need to give staff and service users alike more background information as to why The Big Plan is being implemented in the first place. This transparency, I think, is important in that it keeps service users in particular ‘in the loop’, as it were, as to what is going on in a health care system that many have come to exalt and trust and depend upon throughout their lives as British Citizens.
Our minds as patients, volunteers and involvement partners are a veritable bounty of great ideas as to how services could be improved upon and speaking from my own wealth of experience garnered along my journey through healthcare, I think the key to improving the way things are done is doing it from the ground upward, which is to say starting with the people that actually receive the care, in this case people with lived experience.
The Big Plan does set out to achieve this though, partly through questionnaires or surveys which attempt to gather useful information about patient opinion. This two way dialogue, in my view, gives both the care provider and service user greater scope and unified power in establishing a health care system that caters most appropriately for those that use it, because it allows suggestions and great ideas to be easily shared.
Another thing mentioned in the group was that one hundred questionnaires returned (a target the Big Plan hoped to achieve) wasn’t really going to be adequate, from our perspective, in giving the Notts Healthcare Trust enough feedback to gain a firm foothold in developing strategies to tackle some of it’s failings. I can understand that the Trust doesn’t want to set it’s bar too high because failures to scale said ‘bar’ look bad, but I feel it incumbent upon me as a disgruntled and sometimes severely neglected and mistreated service user that this attitude is one reason that Notts Healthcare is failing. We, as a Trust should be reaching again for that gold standard in every aspect of the care provided and this, I must state again, should primarily be attained through service user/patient and Trust liaising and through regularly utilised communication channels. The amount of ways in which this can be realised is ever-growing and so I think this is a sure-fire way to ensure at least significant or at best great improvement in the provision of good care.
For more information about the Patient and Carer information group click here or visit our website to find out more information about all of our opportunities to get involved.
