Better Patient Journeys
A person’s experience of being cared for by the NSW Health Service is called a patient journey.
Patients often receive care from a range of different clinical and support teams during their journey. For example they may physically move from:
During this journey it’s common for a patient to interact with many different clinical specialist teams. Along the way they also rely on support services for the delivery of parking, administration, food, medication, bedding, heating, IT, telephone systems, and more.
While different teams have specialist responsibilities, we must remember that through the patient’s eyes all our different services are provided by a single team, “the health service”. The patient is on a single journey and we are one team.
Patient research tells us that individually each service provider usually does a great job. Patients compliment the professional expertise and attitude of our clinicians. They trust they are receiving good care. Their phone works, they receive regular meals and they get the right treatment.
But what isn’t always so great is the total coordination of care. It’s the waiting time, lack of communication, confusion about what’s happening next, the unknowing. It’s managing the time between services that’s the biggest disruption to the patient journey.
Improving patient journeys is the core driver for Redesign and we are measuring our progress by introducing patient and carer experience surveys as part of business-as-usual.
You can read about more than 170 real patient and carer experiences right now on ARCHI.
In 2007 every NSW Area Health Service has agreed to:
- participate in a statewide patient survey each year
- regularly interview patients and carers about their experience with our health system
- analyse complaints and compliments data and understand the trends
- survey mental health clients using the MH-COPES survey tool
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