St Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust has published its Patient Experience and Inclusion Strategy for the next three years, 2022 – 2025.
The trust said, following ‘meaningful engagement with patients, key stakeholders and local communities’ the strategy aims to remove barriers to access, improve patient experience, shape services and build upon the successes of the Patient Experience Strategy 2019 – 2022.
The new strategy lays out three main commitments with set objectives linked to each: inclusion and engagement; care and treatment for all; and listening/learning in order to improve.
In order to meet the first of its commitments, the trust plans to work to engage with communities experiencing the greatest health inequalities. The plan lays out their ambition to work in collaboration with the NHS and private sector organisations as well as local communities to establish consistent equality, diversity and inclusion practice. Existing engagement work will also be expanded upon to ensure all activities are inclusive.
Barriers to accessing healthcare will be identified through feedback from protected groups and inclusion groups, and the trust will build upon the implementation of the Accessible Information Standard to develop the accessibility of patient-facing information.
St Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospitals have said that they “do not want to just meet expectations, we want to exceed them.” As such, the trust’s third main commitment – to capture, listen and learn from the experiences of patients, carers and the public – aims to develop new systems for taking on feedback and enhancing learning within the trust, along with improving on the existing systems and working to recognise trends so that relevant actions can be taken.
Read the strategy in full here.
