Patient experience

Improving patient experience by ‘seeing the person in the patient’

We are committed to ensure that our services are developed and improved as a direct result of the patients’ experience, involvement and input; and that the patient is always our first priority. We know that involving patients in the decisions about their care and treatment improves the patient experience which is why we put our patients at the heart of everything we do.

Patient / carer feedback

Your feedback is important to us and is used in many ways to help us share best practice, learn and improve our services across the hospital. Patients, their relatives or carers can complete the Friends and Family Test (FFT) on behalf of a patient. We share your feedback at our Board meetings which are held in public and regular team meetings held across the Trust. We review the results and feedback obtained from the FFT on a regular basis, helping us to learn more about the quality of the services we are providing and the overall experience of care.

On the FFT survey, you will be asked; ‘Overall, how would you rate your experience of our service?’. You can chose from five options ranging from ‘Very good’ to ‘Very poor’, plus ‘Don’t know’. You can also leave comments about your experience to share further information.

For the NHS to deliver safe and high quality services, listening to patients is of vital importance. One of the ways we achieve this is through the nationwide Friends and Family Test (FFT), which was implemented in all NHS hospitals in 2013. Results are published each month on the NHS England website.

The FFT surveys are completely confidential, and responses are not identifiable to any individual. Giving us your feedback will never affect your care or treatment but may help us improve your local hospital services. When leaving hospital, either on the day of discharge or shortly afterwards, you will be invited to give feedback using the survey if you have opted in. Links to each FFT survey are also displayed on this page to ensure that, even once you’ve left our hospital you can still provide your feedback.

For the experiences that go well, we would like to hear these so we can keep doing more of the same and share more of these positive experiences. However, when things do go wrong, it is important that we hear about this too to ensure we can make changes to prevent it happening again.

The Friends and family Test does not replace our existing patient advice and liaison service (PALS) for compliments, concerns or complaints. FFTs are anonymous, and therefore we will not be able to respond individually to any issues raised in the survey. If you have a concern or a complaint, it is important that you speak to a member of staff or contact the PALS team.