Patient stories are a powerful tool which provides healthcare staff with a deeper insight into what happened during a patient’s journey of care and how it truly felt for them personally.
The Board Patient Story provides the opportunity for healthcare staff to explore people’s perceptions of the care they received, to understand what aspects worked well and where a change in practice would be beneficial for future care delivery.
People’s feelings, expressed by them directly as storytellers, is a valuable means of inspiring understanding and empathy, and encourages staff and services within NHSGGC to listen, learn, and act upon what they are told.
Hearing first-hand about the experience of what matters to patients, carers and staff to communicate learning points about the way care is delivered is vital to staff learning and reflection and to improving high quality person-centred, safe and effective care.
June 2024 – Patient Story
Professor Angela Wallace, Executive Nurse Director introduced this story at the board meeting in June 2024, which focussed on the Naloxone Peer Mentor Programme within the Prison Healthcare service.
Aim
The aim of the Board Patient Story Development Group is to:
- Utilise the power of stories to build a person centred and improvement culture within the board aligned to the quality strategy.
- Generate, bring to the surface, and openly listen to people’s experience of our services.
- Develop and present a patient story at each meeting of the NHSGGC Board meetings to demonstrate a range of examples of quality care, what matters to people in our care, their experience of this, staff learning and improvement actions.
- Provide structured support to storytellers to share their personal experiences in clear and constructive ways that informs continuous service development and improvement.
- Share the Board Patient Story widely in NHSGGC and encourage other key groups and committees to start their meeting with a patient story to facilitate reflection, learning and improvement at a local level.
Listening and Learning
Listening and learning from people’s experience of healthcare is fundamental to achieving high quality person centred, safe and effective care as set out in the NHS Scotland Healthcare Quality Strategy.
Several high-level reports including the Francis Inquiry1, the Keogh Review2, and the Berwick report3 highlight that genuinely listening to people and responding to their concerns is vital in terms of improving the quality and safety of care and that failure to do so can have dire consequences. The Patients’ Rights (Scotland) Act is one way how this is being responded to in NHS Scotland. By listening to the views and experiences of patients, families and our communities, NHS Boards can deliver care and services that are based around what is important to people and ultimately drive-up quality. NHS Boards that regularly use stories to improve services develop a culture of participation and a reputation for listening and acting upon what they learn.
A key objective of NHSGGC (NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde) Healthcare Quality Strategy – Pursuit of Excellence is to listen to what matters to patients and their families and present a patient story at the beginning of each board meeting and in other key groups and committees to demonstrate excellence in quality of care and learning and improvements being taken forward in practice.
To support staff across Health Boards, the National Education Scotland (NES) developed an evidence based ‘Listen Learn, Act’ toolkit to guide them through the story gathering process with links to additional resources that they can use for local story gathering work.