What we’re hearing about East Surrey Hospital – December 2023

Healthwatch Surrey staff and volunteers visited East Surrey Hospital on 27 November 2023 to speak with patients, and their families and carers, to find out more about people’s understanding of, and barriers around, providing feedback.

Following our visit, and based on what we heard from the people during these visits, our key recommendations for East Surrey Hosptial were for Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust review how they communicate with patients, their families, and carers about the available means to provide feedback and complaints. We suggest that the importance and benefits of feedback is highlighted to encourage more people to share their view, whether positive or negative, and people are
provided with clearer information about the range of opportunities to provide feedback including PALS, the Friends and Family Test, and independent options such as Healthwatch Surrey.

We also provided some futher questions to explore within the report:

Our interactions with people at East Surrey Hospital have served to shape the recommendation we made at the beginning of this report to ensure that people are as informed as possible with where and how they can give feedback. However, we recognise that our conversations represent a small sample of people who access the hospital, therefore Healthwatch Surrey would encourage East Surrey Hospital to consider the following questions with regards to any future engagements or developments of opportunities to provide feedback:

• How accessible are feedback opportunities or information regarding complaints? Are leaflets or signage presented in clear and easy to understand language?
• How inclusive are feedback opportunities and complaints? Are a diverse range of voices represented and are their equitable opportunities to have voice heard?

Hospital response

Following sending the report to East Surrey Hospital for comment, we received the following response from the Patient and Experience Lead:

We acknowledge there is currently a gap in provision of promoting the Friends and Family Test (FFT) and Your Care Matters (YCM) around the hospital for patients, carers and visitors.

Our patient experience team are currently working on developing a new poster campaign to promote FFT and YCM across the hospital which will be fully implemented by the end of this month.

 We have also recently installed noticeboards across our hospital site to help display posters/information in a more organised and coordinated way.

 Once again thank you for the valuable feedback you and your team have provided us with and we look forward to continuing our work together over the new year.