involve working significant unsocial hours. Where patients do visit the service for Chris Wiltsher is a patient representative and chairs the Patient
meetings, the times of meetings will have to be adjusted to suit volunteers with
Liaison Committee of the Faculty of Radiology, The Royal College
busy lives, again requiring unsocial hours working. Diplomacy will be important;
of Radiologists.
adjusting meeting times to suit patients will pose problems in terms of involving
the senior service leaders in meetings with patients but, without the presence
of senior staff with the decision-making power, the exercise will seem, if not be,
References
tokenistic.
1. Department of Health (2008) High Quality Care for All: NHS Next Stage Review Final
Report London: Department of Health.
Together with particular skills and attributes, the person fulfilling the patient
2. Kennedy, I. (2004) Learning from Bristol: Are we? An essay by Professor Sir Ian
Kennedy London: Healthcare Commission.
involvement role will need to have considerable experience, and be senior
3. Goodrich, Joanna and Cornwell, Jocelyn (2008) Seeing the person in the patient: the
enough to have ready access to and engagement with management. Adding the
Point of Care review paper London: The Kings Fund.
time commitment required produces a role with significant resource implications.
4. NHS Modernising Agency (2003) Radiology: A National Framework for Service
Factor in the time of service leaders for meetings and travel expenses for patient
Improvement London: NHS Modernising Agency, p7.
volunteers, and the resources required for useful patient involvement in service
improvement mount rapidly. Is the result worth the expenditure?
Is patient involvement worth the cost ?
Perhaps the question should be asked in a different way; is a failure to involve
patients worth the cost? The clinical justification for improving the quality of caring
has been noted
3
and, in the face of a growing battery of performance indicators,
no service can afford to neglect any means of improving clinical outcomes. The
financial imperatives to improve the quality of caring are powerful and growing.
As noted earlier, payment will become conditional on quality improvement
1
, not
just volumes. The commercial pressures to improve the quality of caring are also
growing and patient choice is affecting more and more healthcare provision.
Patients are being encouraged to comment on their experience of care, and those
comments will increasingly include comments on the quality of caring. The cost
of failing to improve the quality of caring looks high and is likely to grow; without
Some patients
the involvement of patients, improvement in quality of caring is much less likely.
No service which wishes to engage in successful service improvement can afford
are so grateful
to neglect the quality of caring and so cannot afford to neglect involving patients
actively in its service improvement work.
for their Finally
treatment
The NHS Modernisation Agency
4
proclaimed in 2003 that one of the goals of
service improvement in radiology
was ‘to ensure that the patient is central to
that they have
the service improvement process’. That objective can only be achieved fully by
involving the patient in the service improvement process.
nothing but
praise
2009
|
IMAGING & ONCOLOGY
|
27
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64