Last week, the Network held its ‘Gold Standard in Cardiovascular Services’ conference. Having kicked us off in the morning with a Benjamin Franklin quote asking ‘what good shall we do this day’ I was delighted that the event evaluated extremely well and that we developed outline proposals for a small number of cardiovascular improvement projects. We will be sharing more information on these in the near future together with all the outputs from our day.
In the meantime, what struck me most about the conference were our discussions on patient experience. In particular one of our speakers shared a story of a friend who had recently been in hospital and was being cared for in a bed near the nurses’ station. Unfortunately this patient hadn’t been able to get much rest as the phone at the nurses desk had being ringing constantly and on one occasion alone he had counted nine doctors walking past it without answering it (the speaker advised that many nurses and other healthcare professionals had also ignored it too but his friend didn’t know who they all were).
In response to such stories we also heard how, in one area of the country, a hospital is inviting patients to give real time feedback of their experiences via social media such as twitter in order that they can improve issues like this straight away.
We’ll be giving some more thought to this, and what our role might be as a Network, because after all our best laid plans to support the continuous improvement of cardiovascular care are only going to achieve a first class service for each and every patient if the culture is right!
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