What we’re hearing about Epsom Hospital – October 2023

Healthwatch Surrey staff and volunteers visited Epsom Hospital in September 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 engagement session, our key recommendations for Epsom Hospital are:

• To review how they communicate with patients, their families, and carers about the available means to provide feedback and complaints.
• We suggest that the importance 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 recommend that signposting to clinics and information for people attending outpatient clinics are reviewed.

Hospital response

On receipt of this report, the Patient Experience Lead responded letting us know they had shared the report with colleagues in Maternity, Out-Patients, Estates and Patient Experience to understand the feedback that we collated and the recommendations for improving the ability for patients to provide feedback, positive and negative, about their care. The responses received from these departments were:

Out-patient Services

• In each clinic there is a board that is updated by the nursing team with any delays in clinic, this is not easy in Woodcote due to the logistics of a long corridor OPD area. However, we would expect receptionists to also alert patients to long waiting times when the patients check in and keep the patients in the waiting room updated, this is something we will pick up with the operational manager and team leader to ensure reception staff are reminded to do this going forward in liaison with the nursing team. We expect good communication by all staff and we apologise that this was not apparent on the day Healthwatch Surrey visited.

• We would expect all reception staff to make eye contact with the patients waiting at the reception desk, this will be discussed at the next team meeting with the staff.

• We will review the posters we currently have available for PALS and FFT to see if they are in the correct location for patients and remind staff to signpost patients to these services.

• We would welcome a poster / information from Healthwatch Surrey to display.

Estates and Facilities

• We regularly review way finding for our patients at the Trust and would like to thank Healthwatch Surrey for obtaining this feedback. We will look to review how to improve this in the interim and long term.

Patient Experience

• We have planned to review our patient leaflets for PALS, to ensure that this gives the same message for the Group. In the interim we will provide our current leaflets to the out-patients area and review how we can display these in public areas.

• We have recently improved our FFT posters to include QR codes to try and encourage ease of access for patients to provide feedback about their care and have had focussed training for our inpatient areas to support staff. We will now look to move onto to our out-patient areas to replicate this.

• We will plan a programme of poster campaigns to avoid poster fatigue.

• We will review how we can display the impact of feedback outside of our inpatient areas so encourage patients to let us know about their experience.

Maternity

• Thank you for the feedback, it is good to see the impact feedback has.

• It was disappointing to learn a mother had issues with breast feeding and we will look to see how we can support that department with this.

• We are sorry that a mother reporting feeling vulnerable whilst on the ward and have fed this back to the team at Epsom.