Partners in patient involvement
Patient involvement is essential to the Learning Disability Improvement Standards benchmarking project in order to understand how policies, processes and training are impacting people with a learning disability who are accessing hospital services. This year, the NHS Benchmarking Network (NHSBN) team are partnering with Learning Disability England (LD England) to capture patient voices and experiences.
This year, instead of asking participating NHS Trusts to circulate a patient survey to people who have accessed their services, the team set out to set up three patient focus group workshops. The intention for this was clear:
Ensure that patient voices are captured and collected by the benchmarking project
Test out a new method of collecting patient experiences through workshops - not paper-based surveys
Evaluate how best to collect patient experiences in the future - ask patients how they prefer to give feedback
To set up the focus groups, NHSBN have partnered with LD England, who have a large network of members and member organisations who are able to support the collection of patient experiences. It was decided that three focus groups would be delivered from across different regions in England. In order to do this, three local partnerships have been formed in order to deliver the workshops:
Dudley Voices for Choice
Skills for People - Newcastle
Ace Anglia
Workshops are expected to be held across these three partner networks in March 2025. All feedback, information and data collected will be pulled together by NHSBN who will then create a short report on the findings from the sessions.
As well as the delivery of the three focus group workshops, LD England will also be supporting the circulation of the Family/Carer Survey. This survey is open to any members of family or carers of people with a learning disability who have recently accessed hospital services. The survey will gather family/carer views on the quality of care received. If you are a member of family or carer of someone with a learning disability who has accessed hospital services in the last year, you can complete the survey here: https://surveys.nhsbenchmarking.nhs.uk/x/63180-180