Dr Chaudry is a Consultant Anaesthetist working in a large teaching hospital. He also works in one other NHS hospital and two private hospitals. His patients are a mix of adults and children, undergoing ear, nose and throat (ENT), gynaecology and orthopaedic surgery.
As many of his patients are asleep during most of his contact with them, this makes it difficult for the doctor to ask for feedback. Around a third of his patients are young children, who may struggle to give feedback using standard questionnaires. In addition, he usually works as part of a large team and may be only one of a number of healthcare professionals the patient comes into contact with. He is concerned that his patients might not be able to identify him from other members of the wider team.
While Dr Chaudry found it easy to identify an adequate number and appropriate range of patients to ask for feedback across the four hospitals where he works, understanding how to administer the forms in his particular circumstances required thought and discussions with the healthcare team.
The solution he adopted was to give feedback forms to his patients when they were still on the ward, prior to going into the operating theatre. This made it easier for the patient to identify him and to understand the request. It also made it easier to collect the forms, as it would be harder to trace patients after their operations. As about a third of his patients are children, Dr Chaudry approached their parents, who were able to give him feedback on behalf of their child.
He arranged for a nurse to collect the completed forms from patients and to return them to him the following day. The forms were returned in a bundle, so he could not identify any individual responses. He then sent the completed feedback forms to an independent survey provider, used by all doctors at his Trust, to process the forms and provide him with a personalised report of his results on which to reflect. Ideally, the completed forms should be sent directly to the provider, rather than the doctor, to reduce the risk of the doctor accidentally viewing the feedback before it has been processed.
Dr Chaudry was able to obtain sufficient feedback to allow him to compare his results with the results of other doctors in the same specialty using these questionnaires. He was pleased to find that the scores he received from his patients and family members were overwhelmingly positive.
