Staff Acknowledgment and Feedback February

My name is Kevin Patterson 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 as well as regional service spanning beyond our Trust, it can be challenging to ensure widespread visibility of Care Opinion among all teams. To address this, the Patient Client Experience (PCE) team 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.

This year's Feedback February was focused around Staff Acknowledgment and the introduction of staff acknowledgment certificates which are given to staff whom are mentioned by name on Care Opinion. We developed a communication strategy with the Corporate Comms team, which included creating multimedia content and 2 social media posts from the Deputy Director of Nursing and Service Manager for Patient Experience.

The Corporate Comms Team did 4 individual stories of staff whom received certificates and focused on the importance of Feedback, what this means to the person and what the staff experience was on getting the story posted online. 

https://belfasttrust.hscni.net/2024/02/01/share-your-story-as-part-of-feedback-february-24/

We organised a roadshow in all Belfast Trust hospitals and community Centres to engage with staff and the public. 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. Overall 52 departments both inpatient and Outpatient inquired about Care Opinion material and training. 

We advertised and facilitated a webinar “Patient feedback, why and why is it important?” at the end of February which was a aimed at senior management. Staff reacted positively to the campaign and showed enthusiasm in using Care Opinion. The webinar was attended by 42 senior managers and included a facilitated group discussion around he research. 

The response from patients has been very positive and many of the people that we approached during the roadshows were not familiar with Care Opinion. Our social media posts and videos also had an exceptional reach. 

Internally we seen an above average readership on Feedback February content with our four staff hitting 582, 354, 433 and 458 views. This is much higher than our usual viewership which would be roughly in the range of 120-150 views. The average readership of Loop news article through the month being 236 per article we seen that the staff stories strongly resonated with our staff audience.

The Corporate Communications Team have taken learning from the Feedback February campaign for internal communications with staff. The content produced for the Loop during the month shows that staff will actively engage with information relating to their colleagues and celebrate their successes in the true ‘Being Belfast’ spirit. Similarly, to develop more focus on staff focussed stories for our internal Loop Trust News in order to continue to encourage more staff to be active on the intranet platform.