Help the NHS improve urgent and emergency care in the UK

PEP Health is proud to be working with a consortium of partners to help NHS England gather important patient feedback to improve urgent and emergency care across the UK. We’d like to invite you to help us spread the word & support the NHS in giving patients the chance to shape how these vital services are delivered in the future.

The survey – which closes soon (30th September) – asks people about their recent experiences to help better understand what they have accessed and why, and what their experience was like. ?

There are continued pressures on NHS urgent and emergency care services arising from increasing calls to NHS 111, A&E attendances, constraints on capacity due to COVID-19, ambulance handover delays and high hospital bed occupancy.

These factors combined lead to crowding of emergency departments, meaning patients spend more time in A&E before admission, transfer or discharge. With the formation of integrated care systems, local health and care services are encouraged to take a system-wide approach to tackling the problem.

To do this effectively, it’s important to understand the experiences of a broad cross-section of patients, whether positive or negative to provide valuable insights into what is driving decision making in accessing urgent and emergency care.

We’d love to invite you to help us in sharing this important community engagement exercise as far and wide as possible.

The project will support the NHS to learn more from patients directly to find out what matters most to them, where challenges lie, and how to best improve vital services so that they can better respond to their needs.

So far hundreds of people have taken part, and we are particularly keen to hear from lesser heard communities to ensure that the sample is as diverse and inclusive as possible. In particular, we would greatly value the input of those aged under 50 or over 70- years old, as well as from Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities.

Dr Mark Lomax from PEP Health, comments. “This is a really great opportunity for us to hear first-hand from patients about their experiences to help us gain a better understanding of how things have changed in the last four years. And, importantly, what can be done to improve it.

“We want to gain as much information and views from as many people as we can and as wide a range as possible in terms their interactions with the system. It’s a great chance for them to have their say so we can look at how we can make healthcare work better for local people and across the country.

“We’d like to invite our partners across the NHS to help us spread the word about this important initiative and invite patients across the UK to have their say in shaping the future of these vital services.”

Help us spread the word

Urgent and emergency care (UEC) services perform a critical role in keeping the population healthy across the UK. The NHS responds to more than 110 million urgent and emergency calls or visits every year, so it is essential that the system works effectively.

The research programme will help support NHS England’s understanding and is being supported by a consortium of five UK-based organisations including, Health Innovation East , Patient Experience Library ( Miles Sibley ), Ethnic Opinions , and Traverse .

As well as the questionnaire, patient feedback is also being collated from a variety of places such as focus groups and by analysing comments made on social media platforms.

All the findings will be brought together in a final report that will be published later in the year.

In order to reach out to as many people as possible, we’d like to invite you to please share our survey within your networks and with partner organisations. Your support would be hugely valuable.

If you’d like to learn more about how you can help us spread the word, please drop us a comment below.

Who can participate

Anyone who has accessed any type of urgent and emergency care over the last 4 years is invited to take part in our survey, however we are particularly interested in anyone who may have used these services over the last three months.

Services include 999 emergency services, A&E departments, NHS 111 online (including NHS App and NHS.uk), NHS 111 telephone service (including textphone service and NHS 111 Clinical Assessment Service) and Urgent Treatment centres.

The questionnaire takes a few minutes – and everyone who fills out the survey will also have the option to be entered into a prize draw for a ￡50 Amazon voucher.

Patients can take part in the short survey here: https://www.pephealth.ai/patient-experience-survey-2022

PEP Health is an innovative AI platform dedicated to listening and understanding what patients say about their care. The technology makes sense of free text comments made by patients from across the digital landscape including social media and review sites, as well as surveys, converting them into near real-time feedback.?For more information, please visit: https://www.pephealth.ai/