Pilots helping the National Kidney Care Audit take off
- I’ve written about the National Kidney Care Audit on this blog before, and a pilot patient transport survey has just gone really well by all accounts.
On 15 and 16 October all renal units in England will be carrying out a patient transport survey – please make a note of this in your diaries, if you haven’t already done so. Ahead of this, 12 units in London, Bristol and the North West have just taken part in the pilot, covering almost a thousand patients.
“It was fine here, we’re quite a small unit so it was easy to give the survey out to patients, monitor them and collect the surveys back in,” the Clinic Manager at the Camden Dialysis Unit Jane Moore commented.
The units have told us that the pilot went really smoothly and I’m pleased to see that it didn’t disrupt their day to day work. The project team at The NHS Information Centre who are carrying out the audit have taken on board some comments from participants. They will be simplifying the wording of a couple of questions to make them easier to understand – especially for patients whose first language is not English.
Most importantly, feedback is that the patients were really positive: “the patients are definitely engaging with the audit, especially because most of them use transport services,” Jane Moore said. “It’s always worth being involved in audits because you can have your say. People complain about issues like patient transport, but taking part in the audit will allow you to contribute.”
I’m very grateful to everyone that took part in the pilot, and would like to pay personal thanks to all the staff and patients at the Bristol Royal Hospital for Children, Royal Liverpool University Hospital, Broadgreen Hospital, Whiston Hospital, Warrington Hospital, St Bartholomew's Hospital, The Royal London Hospital, Camden Dialysis Unit, Whipps Cross University Hospital, the Queen's Hospital Romford and Evelina Children's Hospital. I think the National Kidney Care Audit is an important piece of work that will bring real benefits to kidney services.
For more information on the audit and how you can sign up to take part, you can visit www.ic.nhs.uk/kidneycareaudit or e-mail kidneycare@ic.nhs.uk
