Public and Patient Engagement and Customer Service

As the NHS Commissioning Board (NHS CB) comes to life over the next few months and starts to review the plans of Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs), we are likely to hear more about Public and Patient Engagement (PPE).

One of the aspects that the NHS CB will consider, as they assess each CCG’s suitability to start commissioning services in anger, is whether the group has adequately addressed PPE in the area they cover.

PPE is about communicating with and involving patients and other stakeholders in decisions about their local health services. In my view this means ALL patients, not just the ones that offer to go on patient groups or those that find themselves as a lay member on the board of a CCG. (Just for the record and in case the powers that be are listening, I would be delighted to be involved as a lay member of the board in the CGG including Alvechurch. CV available on request!).

One assumes that a key part of the reason for the PPE requirement is to improve the overall service delivered by GP’s and others, by getting feedback from customers (or patients as they tend to be known in the NHS) and using this to drive improvements.

Now it can be very hard to accurately capture a patient’s assessment of the service they have received from a GP practice. Take a simple example: It was difficult to make a GP appointment and the receptionist greeted you in a cold and unfriendly manner. Then the doctor makes an early diagnosis on a potentially life threatening condition and you get the treatment you need. How would you rate this experience as a patient? What should the practice focus on to further improve?

I know what my first priority is for my local GP practice – delivering clinical excellence.  What about the second priority? Well it would not go amiss for them to make dealing with them a little bit easier for patients.

It is often not, as they say, rocket science. On the NHS choices website (http://www.nhs.uk/) on average 55% of the patients who complete the feedback form would recommend their own GP practice to a friend. For those GP practices who supply the chairman of their CCG, in the Midlands and East SHA Cluster, this rises to 82%.  When this practice also has a website to provide basic information to patients, then this recommendation rate rises to a very impressive 97%.  

Whether it’s the website itself which improves the recommendations or the fact that GP practices with websites are clearly more customer orientated is a debatable point. However it is evidence that those who care about patient engagement (and presumably listen to what those patients are saying) are rewarded with higher patient ratings.

This gives some encouragement that sharing “best practice” amongst the members of the CCG could lead to improvements in service, without the need for huge expenditure to achieve it. I shall follow the development of PPE with some interest over the coming months.

By Jon Davies| Righttrack’s Digital Marketing Manager

PS If you are part of a GP Practice or Clinical Commissioning Group then take a look at
Righttrack’s NHS training pages