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Team Spotlight - Patient engagement team The Patient, Carer & Public Involvement (PCPI) Team work in collaboration with staff, patients and the public to develop and shape services. Their work drives forward improvements in the care provided at LTHT by using the feedback received from patients, carers and visitors.
What are the different roles within the team? There are five members of the team: Jennifer Gaunt - PCPI Projects Manager, Rosie Horsman - Lead Nurse, Monica Didi - Deputy PCPI Manager, Scott Cunningham - Deputy PCPI Manager and Deb Tighe - Partner Manager.
What happens on an average day? The team work on a wide range of different projects and every day is different. They support the Trust’s Clinical Service Units (CSUs) to gain patient feedback about the care they provide or any changes to their service that are planned. This includes creating surveys, organising workshops, patient panels, reference groups and delivering training and development sessions. They support members of the public to work alongside staff in meetings and forums to provide a public perspective and contribution to discussions. They spend time planning and delivering projects, which includes writing and developing materials and papers for meetings, taking into account different communication needs, so as many people as possible can get involved. They also work with patients to create powerful films that tell the story of their experience, which help to highlight good practice and drive improvements at Trust Board level. The team attend meetings as part of collaborative work with a number
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of partner organisations in the city, including Healthwatch Leeds and Forum Central, to gain a broader understanding of the views of patients.
How do the team make a difference at LTHT? The PCPI team work collaboratively to help LTHT deliver services that are accessible and inclusive, ensuring the patient voice is at the centre of any changes that are planned. For example, they have recently been working with our Eye Clinic team to involve patients in a change to the service that will directly affect them. Working with patients, including those who have visual impairments or are blind, they have facilitated accessible patient reference groups so that this group of patients can share their views to provide a deeper understanding of the impact this will have.
One example they have been working on is the implementation of a Calm at Night Always Event, to help patients to sleep better at night on busy hospital wards. It is important that all hospital services are inclusive, and the team work with services to ensure a diverse range of patient voices are heard. They work with community organisations and charities to reach
patients, including those with alcohol or drug misuse, as well as older people who may only use a telephone and not the internet to communicate. The team also help services to gather feedback on literature including new leaflets and booklets before they are distributed to patients. This ensures they are written in plain English that is easy to understand and any diagrams are clearly formatted with patients in mind. This empowers patients to use the information in the leaflets to manage their care and feel comfortable asking questions to the clinical teams caring for them. Strategies are an important part of managing the way services are run and providing direction, and the PCPI team help to make their development patient centred. They recently worked with the safeguarding team on their new strategy and they also enabled patients to play a key role in the development of the Trust’s patient safety incident framework. Always Events are “those aspects of the patient and family experience that should always occur when patients interact with healthcare professionals and the health care delivery system”. They aim to understand what really matters to patients, people who use services, their families and carers and then co-design changes to improve experience of care. The team support clinical services taking forward Always Events by collecting and analysing patient feedback and facilitating co-design meetings. One example they have been working on is the implementation of a Calm at Night
