MSDP work with organisations across Merseyside to ensure voices of the Deaf community are heard. Mark McKenna, Head of Patient and Family Experience at NHS University Hospitals of Liverpool Group, tells us what it means to partner with MSDP.
At NHS University of Hospitals of Liverpool Group, we want to provide the best possible experience to patients and families who use our services. To do this, it is essential that we capture feedback from people in all our communities so that we can share good practice and also learn what we can do better.
MSDP have been invaluable in helping us to understand the experiences of people from the deaf community in Merseyside and beyond. Working in partnership with MSDP, we have learned about some of the problems that people in the deaf community have had when attending our hospitals and also some of the barriers they have in contacting us and providing feedback.
Janice Connolly, Community Engagement Manager, has been working in partnership with our Patient Experience and Engagement Team to help us find ways to make it easier for people in the deaf community to provide feedback. We will always treat any complaint we receive seriously, but we also want to find different ways for people to share feedback with us to help us improve and to also share praise with our staff when they have had a good experience.
Together with MSDP, we have co-produced a patient experience survey designed specifically for patients whose first language is BSL. This innovative survey contains videos explaining each question in BSL so that we gain valuable feedback on experience from the deaf community in a way that suits them. Over the next year, we will develop and use further surveys using this approach.
We are excited to build on this success and work together with MSDP to explore further ways in which we can capture feedback from the deaf community and use this within our hospitals to improve the care and experience of people who are deaf, deaf-blind and hard of hearing.
If you are deaf or Hard of Hearing, or know someone who is, then please let us know about your experiences of attending hospital in Liverpool by filling in the patient experience survey: www.shorturl.at/Pyn1l
