News about Patient & Outcome Experience Developments
Audiology services develop improved pathways
Audiology services develop improved pathways
As part of the NHS Improvement organisation’s brief, Audiology pathways have come under review with the publication of a Shaping the Future of Audiology publication. The recommendations follow the usual review of any unnecessary steps and delays to improve throughput but also recognises the importance of continuously listening to patients. Services which involve pathways which can cross professional boundaries can particularly benefit from structured stage measurement of patient reported experience and outcome.
Measures can include not just satisfaction but also PROMS such as the Outcome Inventory for Hearing Aids (IOI-HA). One of the problems with traditional experience and outcome measures is that when they are administered by staff, apart from the potential confidentiality and influence issues, measurement is fixed around visits. This leads to artificial and inaccurate results because the longer term impact is not measured. The best way of avoiding this is to use timed stage measurement so that patients, their carers and relatives can have their ultimate clinical outcomes and pathway experience followed up automatically after a given time period even if the patients have been referred on or been discharged.
Measurement is not just about questionnaires, departments involved in re-design have seen the value of patient focus groups, more extensive commentaries and patient stories.
Managing such programmes can be time consuming and therefore expensive but services such as the COM-Q service from CoMetrica can help achieve this easily.
This service has the added value of being tied into patient data and being able to generate patient specific measurement content which can use images and graphics so opens up measurement to children, those with learning disabilities and other communication impairment.
This article is from our June 2011 newsletter which can be downloaded from our library here
For more information contact Stuart Mathieson at CoMetrica.co.uk
The Audiology Improvement programme document can be downloaded here