Feedback February within Belfast HSCT

My name is Rocio Muina Lopez and I am a Patient and Client Experience Facilitator. While my role is mostly promoting Care Opinion for the Belfast Trust, I also work with other patient experience projects that we develop to collect, monitor and act upon service user’s experiences of care.

At the Belfast Health and Social Care Trust, we have implemented Care Opinion as a vital tool for gathering feedback. However, being the largest Trust in Northern Ireland with services spanning across 3 acute hospitals, 2 secondary hospitals, and 7 Wellbeing and Treatment Centres, it can be challenging to ensure widespread visibility of Care Opinion among all teams. To address this, my team and I devised and launched "Feedback February", a month-long campaign aimed at raising awareness about Care Opinion amongst:

• Service users, visitors and the wider Belfast area public.
• Staff at the BHSCT Trust, irrespectively of their place of work.
• Senior management at the BHSCT.

Firstly, we developed a communication strategy with the Corporate comms team, which included creating multimedia content and 10 social media posts for the month. The Deputy Director of Nursing presented a video to launch the event and We organized a roadshow in 6 hospitals and community Centres to engage with staff and the public. We advertised and facilitated two webinars “Introduction to Care Opinion” aimed at staff of all grades. Staff reacted positively to the campaign and showed enthusiasm in using Care Opinion. This has prompted numerous inquiries and requests for training & promotional material from teams that had not used Care opinion before.

To gain support and visibility with senior management we organized a webinar at the end of February with guest speaker Prof. Brian Dolan. The title was “What happens to healthcare when we start with the patient and work backwards”. The webinar was attended by 46 senior managers and included a facilitated group discussion about how to foster a culture of openness and understanding within our teams.

While staff intranet and email reached staff effectively, the roadshows were instrumental in starting meaningful conversations with other teams and staff.

We also got to speak with service users and distributed promotional material amongst visitors. They might have not left a story that day, but I believe that the rise in the number of monthly stories since February is mostly due to an increased awareness of Care Opinion. From February 2022 to January 2023, there was an average of 39 stories per month. From February to June 2023 the average number of stories is 61.5 per month, which is an increase of more than 50%..

The response from patients has been very positive and many of the people that we approached during the roadshows were no familiar with Care Opinion. Our social media posts and videos also had a good reach, so I am hoping that my team helped to spread the Care Opinion word a bit further!

Following the success of "Feedback February," we aim to make it an annual event to continue engaging staff, senior management and the public. Our commitment lies in embedding Care Opinion within our services, fostering a culture of openness and continually improving patient safety and experience.