Working together to make improvements

    

My name is John Smith. I am an Orthotist at NHS Forth Valley. I provide people with medical devices, otherwise known as orthoses. These orthoses can include things like shoes, insoles, splints and knee braces. We use to orthoses to make people more active, independent and to help reduce pain.

As we are a very small department, a lot of our patients haven’t heard of us before and may not understand what they have been referred to our service for. For those who do understand who we are, the thought of using an orthoses can also be quite daunting initially. It is therefore important that when people come to our clinics, we are as welcoming and approachable as possible and that we are able to answer any questions they may have. We endeavour to make the information we give to people clear and concise so that patients leave their appointment with the knowledge they need to use their new orthoses effectively and to manage their health and healthcare better.

Patient Opinion gives the people who come to our department the opportunity to tell us about their experience so that we are more equipped to help others in the future. It also allows our patients to tell us what we are doing well and what we could potentially do better. I believe feedback from the people who use our service is invaluable and must be captured and used to further improve the service. Over the past few years, we have used patient feedback to support some of the positive changes made to our service.

Examples of this are;

• We built a new workshop within the hospital so that patients could bring their orthosis to the hospital to be repaired, rather than sending it away for long periods of time.
• We created a new larger stock room so that more people could take their orthoses away on the same day as their appointment rather than having to return a few weeks later to have it fitted.

I hope that introducing Patient Opinion to the Orthotics Service will empower all of our patients to have a say in what matters to them when they come to our clinics. Despite the various information systems which may be used to tell us about all kinds of data- nothing replaces our most valuable source of information... and that is our patients! Patient Opinion allows staff and patients to work together in making improvements.