Connecting with the Staff, the Patients and the People! - A Care Opinion Journey

Today was FANTASTIC. In my new role as Patient Experience Coordinator I am lucky enough to work with Care Opinion every single day in my office. Today I got out of my office and into the hospital - presenting Care Opinion to the Clinical Oncology team here are the Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust. I met matrons, senior nurses, consultants and team improvement leads all of whom were excited to get started with promoting and using Care Opinion straight away! This was the first time I have stood up and spoken to a team of people before, it was nerve-racking but my my, what a subject to talk about as a first timer!

This is me anxiously waiting for my time slot!!!!

They loved the richness of the feedback we get from the stories shared on Care Opinion and completely got why getting more of our staff on board, signed up and responding to our patients and their families was important. They can't wait to get started!

Part of what I love about my role is being able to give staff feedback, good or bad. This coupled with a passion for creativity drives me forward to want more! We tweet constantly (@RCHTPtExp - follow us!), encouraging staff to use social media so we can tag them in Care Opinion feedback. Sometimes we are all too busy at work to look at another piece of feedback sent via email, but social media is something we all tap into these days, at the touch of a button. Another way we as a team are about to make contact with staff is via our quarterly newsletters (soon to go monthly - who knows? We always have so much to shout about - watch this space!), this image is from quarter 2's newsletter - aren't we doing well :)

Here you can see some of our staff who have become responders, completing the training and got their certificates! Well done guys! Our story swarm over the last quarter is looking great, we're getting better at spotting the changes that can be made, not just from negative feedback but from positive stories too.

I firmly believe that the use of images and creativity greatly improves our ability to communicate, I know that people like me would be bored reading this by now if there weren't pictures. Being able to use visual representation is great, we've recently been tweeting about what patients thought was good about our hospital, and what could be improved - both of which our staff seem to love engaging with, even first thing on a Monday morning! After all "a picture is worth a thousand words".

What can be improved............

Something that is becoming big in our team and indeed the Trust is the use sketchnotes to get that information across - maybe I'll do one about Care Opinion.....

Off sketchnoting now - will write again soon! 

Jess :)