Recommendation AFA-1: Patient focus and complaints

The Inquiry recommends that the Trust and Department work together to ensure there is:
• A specific programme of work to strengthen patient involvement, improve communication, and ensure patients and families are treated as partners in care.
• Direct communication with patients as standard practice.
• More effective handling of concerns and complaints, with an emphasis on early resolution, learning and advocacy support.
• Routine collection and use of patient experience data and transparent public reporting of quality and outcomes in accessible formats.
Such a programme of work should involve patients and the Patient and Client Council (PCC) as well as senior leaders and Trust Board members. It should include both an agreed strategy and prioritised implementation. Leadership for the plan should be clear. It should be overseen both at Trust Board and at regional level by the Department. The programme should include work on how to involve and support vulnerable groups and is likely to benefit from a learning partnership type of approach.
The programme should also include:
• A mandate to write directly to patients so that they are fully involved as partners in their own care.
• Directions regarding the framing and style of all communications with patients and families.
• Further work on the most effective way of involving patients and families in the framework for managing incidents and in the complaints process, taking account of the most recent policies in this area. This should include an agreement on whether to legislate for formal patient advocacy as recommended by the PCC, or whether an alternative effective approach is sufficient.
• A plan for how best to ensure a smoother system for responding to patients about day-to-day queries, concerns and issues with services. The aim should be both to provide relevant and necessary information to patients and to enable resolution of matters at an early stage, before formal complaints are raised. This should also include work on how best to communicate with patients on waiting lists, so they are not left unaware of their place on the waiting list and have clarity about what to do should their condition deteriorate. There should be a system to record harm to patients as a result of very long waits, so that this can be automatically highlighted to clinicians, managers, leaders and patients.
• An agreed plan to outline how to involve patients in improvement work and learning from error as well as in strategic planning of services.
• Guidance on the most useful way of capturing patient experience information.
• Guidance on the best way to provide information on quality, safety and patient outcomes in the public domain in a way that is accessible to patients and families.