Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust’s ‘giving voice to patients and staff in an out of view service – a relational approach’ project was runner-up in the ‘staff engagement and improving staff experience’ category of the Patient Experience Network National Awards 2024 (PENNA24).
Introduction:
Northumbria Healthcare Trust (NHCT) employs 12,000 staff and provides care to over 500,000 people in Northumberland and North Tyneside. We are the largest geographical Trust in the UK, covering 2500+ square miles. Our facilities include emergency care hospital, general and community hospitals, outpatient/diagnostic centres, elderly care units, an integrated health and social care facility.
North Tyneside Mental Health Services for Older People (MHSOP), part of NHCT, provides psychiatric services for older people in North Tyneside. This includes two Community Mental Health Teams, Nursing Home Team, Liaison Service, Outpatient Memory Clinic, Young Onset Dementia Service, two on-site MHSOP wards.
Ward 20 is an organic psychiatric ward caring for people living with dementia; Ward 21 is a functional older persons’ psychiatric ward. Both have 14 beds and a ward manager, psychiatric nursing, healthcare assistants, OT, activity coordinator, medical staff, domestics, and psychology input.
Project summary:
Older adults with mental illness experience significant health inequalities. Their care requires sensitivity, with distinct observational and relational skills. Staff need support in this for individual and team functioning and wellbeing. This project created an ongoing, unique focus, triangulating patient experience/relatives’ feedback and culture work with staff to enhance relational understanding and make data meaningful. We recognised invisibility of MHSOP wards, which weren’t appropriate for our Real Time patient feedback.
We designed bespoke feedback to capture patients’ / relatives’ experiences and responded to additional insight into staff working within this service, with feelings of similar invisibility and lack of understanding across the acute organisation about their specialised work. The project witnessed a new collaboration between the MHSOP leadership team, clinical team, and Experience Team.
Staff Experience Survey feedback for this team had not previously reached the reporting level. Success of the project is measured quantitatively and qualitatively across patient feedback, relatives’ contribution, staff survey feedback, and the development of bespoke relational team charters. Staff training, including trauma-informed care, psychological safety and development of team charters, is now central to MHSOP inpatient service development, influencing ‘Working with Teams’ interventions across the organisation.
Impact and results achieved:
Patient feedback impact included: independent observations and feedback from relatives, provides a patient ‘voice’ from a previously unheard population; bespoke Real Time feedback on Ward 21 provides comparable data with our medical wards, incorporating quantitative and qualitative data; infographics give visual summaries for staff and patients.
Staff survey and relational team workshops impact included: staff survey results improved post-workshop and reached team-level reportable numbers.
What makes this initiative stand out?
This initiative stands out in the following ways:
Key elements to success:
Contact details
Joanne Mackintosh – [email protected]
