West Middlesex University Hospital has a strong culture of involving its patients, families and careers in the development of our services and value all the feedback we receive.

In April 2013 we introduced the Friends and Family Test (FFT) and have been asking adult inpatients (but not maternity) and patients in A&E whether they would recommend our hospital to their friends and family.

The FFT is a new government initiative that aims to give hospitals and the public regular and up to date feedback on what patients think about their services. It gives our patients a real opportunity to voice their opinions and help shape better services.

Since we started gathering the results, the feedback we have received has been overwhelmingly positive with 94% of patients surveyed saying they would be either extremely likely or likely to recommend us to their friends and family.

We have also received some very useful feedback from this, which is helping us to improve the services we provide. A number of patients who had stayed on our acute medical unit had experienced issues with getting the food they had requested from the menu. This is a short stay assessment ward from which patients are either discharged or transferred to a specialist ward for further treatment. We have since been working with our caterers to make improvements to the way food is delivered even when patients move wards.

The responses we receive are fed back directly to staff on the wards and in A&E as well as to our Trust Board so that we engage staff across the hospital in this important area of work.

We do recognise that our response rate has room for improvement. We have been looking at different methods of obtaining feedback and would encourage all our inpatients and those visiting A&E to fill in a form when they are asked. If patients feel they have not had the opportunity to give their feedback then please get in touch with our patient advice and liaison service via pals.service@wmuh.nhs.uk or 020 8321 6261.

The results for our Trust can be seen here.

August 2, 2013