Today North Cumbria Integrated Care NHS Foundation Trusts’ 2019 inpatient survey results have been published.

The latest survey asked for the views of adults who had stayed overnight as an inpatient at Cumberland Infirmary and West Cumberland Infirmary in July 2019. The inpatients were asked what they thought about different aspects of the care and treatment they received.

The National Inpatient Survey is an annual survey that measures the experience of care from the perspective of  adult patient’s.

1,185 of patients who were discharged following an inpatient stay in July 2019 were contacted, with 582 patients providing a response. Overall the Trust’s response rate is 49.11%, which is higher than the overall national return rate of 45%.

For the majority of questions asked there were no significant differences between last year’s and this year’s results and compared with other Trust’s, NCIC’s results are about the same.

The survey covered a whole range of questions on inpatient experience, and inpatients were asked to score their experience out of 10 with 10 being the best. Our scores ranged from 9.5 to 1.5, similar to other NHS Trusts.

Overall the Trusts’ results have been positive in a number of areas, including:

  • Patients’ felt satisfied that the clinician they saw had all the necessary information on their condition or illness.
  • Patients’ had confidence in doctors and nurses.
  • Staff were caring.
  • Patients’ felt like they were treated with dignity and respect.

The survey did also highlight areas to be improved upon, including, reviewing information given to patients who are discharged, providing more information to patients on their condition or treatment and the length of time patients were on the waiting list before their admission to hospital.

Over the past year the Trust has been working towards improving the overall experience for patients and have made a number of improvements, including:

  • A clinical surgical procedure library which holds pre- operative patient information fact sheets related to over 400 surgical procedures has been implemented. Staff can give this evidence based patient information to patients as part of discussing their  surgical treatment and care
  • Recruitment of a discharge liaison team whose role focusses on improving supporting timely, safe discharge of patients and agreeing plans of ongoing care support with the patient, their carers and other support services
  • The formation of the Trust following the merger of North Cumbria University Hospitals NHS Trust and Cumbria Partnership NHS Foundation Trust in 2019 has allowed new opportunities to develop patient experience.
  • The appointment of a new chief executive, Lyn Simpson in January 2020 who has brought new and fresh ideas to enhance patient care and experience.

Ensuring every patient experience is a great experience is a priority for the Trust and all patient feedback received is extremely valuable to help continually review and improve services for patients and their carers.

Anna Stabler, Chief Nurse said:

We are grateful to those patients who took time to respond to the survey as it is always helpful to receive feedback from patients.

It is particularly good to see a number of positive areas and is a real testament to all of our staff who work hard to ensure we deliver quality, safe care to our patients.

At the Trust one of our key priorities is looking at ways to improve the experience of our patients whilst they’re in our care and are using our services. This feedback will really help assist us with this.

The formation of the Trust following the recent merger in October 2019 has also enabled us make improvements prior to these results being published. A lot of work has been going on the in background which will enable us to provide more joined up and seamless services for our patients in north Cumbria. We have reshaped our internal care group structures to reflect the services that we provide and this will offer more joined up care for our patient population. We’ve also updated our local patient experience surveys to enable to us to get more detailed feedback which we can use alongside national surveys such as this.

Our teams will now look at the results in more detail alongside our other patient feedback to identify any trends. We are committed to continually improve and we value our patients’ feedback to help us to do that.

The survey took place prior to North Cumbria Integrate Care NHS Foundation Trust forming. Therefore, the survey refers to the former North Cumbria University Hospitals NHS Trust.

View the full report at: https://www.cqc.org.uk/publications/surveys/adult-inpatient-survey-2019