In Your Shoes

In Your Shoes is all about listening to our patients to improve the quality of the care we provide. It gives our staff the chance to hear your experiences of King’s, and find out what is important to you, what we do well and what we need to improve.

Our inpatients tell us that privacy, pain control and good communication are important – but treating people with respect and dignity, involving them in decisions that affect them, and making sure the place is clean are considered to be the most important. Outpatients want to wait less, to get better information and to have quality time with the doctor.

That sounds simple enough, but what does it really mean? What are the key things that all of us can do to make sure that our patients feel that we treat them with dignity and respect at all times? Well, that’s why we need to put ourselves in our patient’s shoes, listen to what they tell us and act on it. That’s where you come in!

Throughout the year, we hold a series of In Your Shoes events designed for people who have received care at King’s. All we need is a couple hours of your time to take part in a series of one-to-one chats with individual members of staff so you can both gain a greater understanding of each other’s experiences. We want to understand what a high-quality service really means to you.

In Your Shoes is open to anyone who has been a patient at the Trust in the past year unless they are currently involved in a complaint against King's.

What you said

Hearing things from the patient perspective is really key to King’s getting things right for patients.

During our Outpatient In Your shoes event in March, 19 patients and staff attended. The feedback was good with patients feeling positive about “the open discussion”, “meeting interested members of staff” and “being able to raise issues”.

Listening to patient stories was also very much valued by staff, with comments ranging from feeling “positive, happy, motivated and proud” to “It made me want to get others to hear the experiences and see how they can influence service change for the better” and “It made me feel that change is possible and that simple things can make a lot of difference.”

Key issues raised by patients included:
• Initial reception contact can affect the rest of the experience
• Planning appointments better and particularly co-ordinating tests
• Continuity of care – don’t want to keep telling the same story
• Keeping GPs in the loop
• Waits in clinics
• Transport and waits for porter too long

We also had some very helpful feedback, both positive and negative, about our new touch screen patient registration kiosks and changes to our appointments system which we can feed in to our outpatient improvement programme.

Outpatient In Your Shoes event – April 2012

Have you been an outpatient at King’s in the past year? If so, why not come and share your story with us and help to plan improvements?

Being at King’s is a part of normal everyday working life for our staff. So they may not always remember that coming to hospital can be a time when patients feel anxious and vulnerable.

By putting ourselves in your shoes and listening to your story, we can build a better understanding of what it’s like to be an outpatient at the Trust and how we can improve your experience with us.

What happens at the event?

If you’ve come to one of our outpatient clinics in the past year or so, we would like you to come along to our In Your Shoes event and share your story with members of staff.

We will ask you what made your visit to King’s good or not so good. If you had a good experience, we want to know exactly what made it good; if your experience was not so good, we want to know what would have made it better.

We will then share with you some of the ideas we have for improving our outpatient service, such as a new booking system, and can get your views. We would also like to hear any ideas you have for improving what we offer, so the changes we make will work for you as a patient.

We will provide refreshments. The venue is accessible.

Date: Friday 27 April
Time: Afternoon
Venue: King’s College Hospital

You will need to book in advance for these events as places are limited.
For more information and to book a place, please contact the Patient and Public Involvement & Membership Manager, Rachel Sugarman:

Tel 020 3299 3462
Email kch-tr.kingsppi@nhs.net