The Trust’s maternity service is implementing a new initiative that allows women who have given birth to provide electronic feedback on all aspects of their care, throughout pregnancy and delivery.

Staff are keen to hear what women say about their care and how the experience can be improved make improvements. The new tool being development will allow the Trust to collect comments about individual doctors and midwives and to feed back that information to staff in a safe and anonymised way.

Gathering and using this information effectively is a big task so the Trust is working with the Picker Institute who are experts in utilising patient feedback.

The benefits of the new feedback tool are:

• Gaining a better understanding of how women use services
• Opportunities to learn from positive and negative feedback to improve at an organisational level, and at an individual staff level
• Supporting revalidation for doctors and midwives.

Ted Adams, Consultant Obstetrician and Gynaecologist at the Trust, said: “Many large organisations use customer feedback to improve what they do. Southport and Ormskirk Hospital NHS Trust is no different. We want to use modern ways of asking our patients what they think about our care so that we can speed up our response to our patients. We must also support our staff to use the feedback they receive positively.”

For more information please contact: Kimberley Rushton, Senior Communications and Marketing Officer, 01704 705061, kimberley.rushton@nhs.net