University Hospital of North Staffordshire uses COM-Q to measure experience of all A&E service users

The University Hospital of North Staffordshire in Stoke on Trent is undergoing major change with the phased relocation to a brand new hospital.

The Trust is to move its A&E services from the old Royal Infirmary soon and wanted to measure the experience of A&E service users before and after the move to ensure that demonstrable improvement in the A&E experience was felt by their patients.

The service chose the COM-Q service for its flexibility to ask different questions of different patients and link the results to patient data, producing quantitative reproducible measures for comparison over time.

It was important that all A&E users were included in the measurement, including the parents & carers of patients where required rather than a samll skewed sample which often results when using passive capture in the clinical setting.

The measurement will include all 500 patients per day going through the A&E department for treatment and those admitted for tests or observation in one of the admission wards over a one week period. This will be repeated over the coming months before and after the move to the new hospital site.

For more information about the project contact Helen Inwood, Deputy Director of Nursing at University Hospital North Staffordshire or Stuart Mathieson at CoMetrica.