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. 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.

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

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.

Always Event, to help patients to sleep better at night on busy hospital wards. The team deliver engagement events to understand patient views on service changes. An event was delivered in the Hearing and Balance Centre to understand how moving the service might affect patients and what should be considered for this patient group when choosing the new location for the service. The service has now moved to Seacroft Hospital to enable building works for two new hospitals at LGI to commence.

Deb recruits and provides training to the public, so they can be involved in the quality and safety related work of the Trust as patient partners. So far, partners have joined the unplanned care board, quality improvement collaboratives and supported the work of the Kaizen Promotion Office (KPO). The key to this has been learning how to empower patients to feel comfortable in joining these meetings and learning how to support staff to work alongside members of the public in this way.

The key to this has been learning how to empower patients to feel comfortable in joining these meetings

Are there any recent achievements or plans for the future?

The team were delighted to have their patient partner work recognised on a national platform when they won the Health Service Journal, Patient Safety Awards 2021: Service User Engagement and Co-production Award. The Leeds Hospital’s Partner Programme - Powering Improvement with Patients and Public now includes 16 ‘Partners’ or recruited members of the public, who are making meaningful contributions to all areas of Quality and Safety Improvement work. A new project called the Community Connectors is also underway. The overarching aim of this work is to tackle health inequalities and enable public health messaging to reach communities including refugees living in Leeds. This includes working with a number of partners and charities in the city and insight gathered from this will help drive forward improvements in healthcare.

Leeds Children’s Hospital bring back Father Christmas!

In December, Leeds Children’s Hospital had a very special visit from Father Christmas, Mrs Claus, elves, reindeer and even some very festively dressed donkeys! Father Christmas and his helpers met with patients from across Leeds Children’s Hospital in a specially created, socially distanced grotto in the Candlelighters Trust Pavilion outside Clarendon Wing.

2021 was the second year that Father Christmas hasn’t been able to visit the wards due to Covid-19 restriction but the team at our children’s Hospital are not easily beaten when it comes to bringing Christmas magic to children in hospital! In 2020 staff created some Christmas magic (and quite a lot of attention) by making Father Christmas fly - with a little help from a cherry picker. This year the team have worked tirelessly in the run up to Christmas to be able to welcome Father Christmas and his helpers back into hospital grounds so that patients could come and see them face to face.

Creating a socially distanced grotto in the Pavilion at short notice was no mean feat but hosting Father Christmas on hospital grounds meant that even some of our most unwell patients were been able to visit, accompanied by medical staff.

Play Leader Lucy Dove was part of the event team: ‘It was amazing to a part of the Santa experience and see all the patients, parents and staff’s faces when they saw the donkeys, reindeer, Santa and Mrs Claus, which made their time in hospital far more enjoyable! A special mention should go to Santa and Mrs. Claus who did a brilliant job of engaging and entertaining the patients.’ The event was made possible with a huge team effort involving staff from across the hospital and charity partners Leeds Hospitals Charity and Candlelighters Trust.