Listening to stories in the Cardiac Assessment Hub

Care Opinion provides another opportunity for patients, carers, and families to share their experiences of health and social care within the Western Trust. The feedback goes directly to the appropriate staff in the identified locations so that they can respond. The public will be able to see how their feedback can make real changes.

We asked Michelle McQuaide, Chest Pain Assessment Nurse, Altnagelvin Hospital to talk about the benefits of Care Opinion to our services in this short video.

You can see all the feedback about the Cardiac Assessment Hub and responses here. There is also a transcript of the video below.

Thank you Michelle for sharing your thoughts.

Video Transcript

My name’s Michelle, I’m one of the chest pain nurses working on the Cardiology Assessment Hub. We set up this hub at the end of April in response to patients not seeking medical treatment during the Pandemic.

We have used the feedback as a way of validating our service and making improvements if necessary as we go forward with this new hub.

I have found the whole process extremely humbling. When a patient takes the time to thank you personally for the care and treatment that they have received, then you’re very grateful and very appreciative. I find it even more powerful when a patient takes the time to write or email their stories documenting how they felt during their visit to the hub and the treatment that they received.

As nurses, we continually strive to ensure that the treatment that we provide our patients is of a very high standard, and this is a way of validating it.

Prior to starting it, we received training in order to answer the stories and at the start I was extremely nervous about how I was going to respond; especially if the feedback was positive. But as time went on, and the more stories that you answered, and the more comfortable you felt, I found it a lot easier.

Again, I am continually amazed at people actually taking the time to write and express how they felt during their visit to our hub, and how well they felt their treatment was.

We’re a very small team. There’s only five of us, so we share all the stories between each other, especially if the patient has taken the time to mention your name individually and we are very supportive of each other, because as nurses, we continually strive to ensure that we deliver a very high standard of care.