Questback (http://www.questback.com/uk/) today announced that the Somerset Partnership NHS Foundation Trust is implementing its NHS Staff Community. The Trust will use Questback to provide a single platform for communicating with its 4,000 staff across Somerset, Dorset and the Isle of Wight, listening to and acting on their feedback and consequently enhancing engagement.
Somerset Partnership NHS Foundation Trust provides a wide range of integrated community health, mental health, learning disability services from 13 community hospitals across Somerset, as well as mental health inpatient services on eight mental health wards. It runs seven minor unit units and four dental access centres and has over 400,000 patient contacts each year.
Questback’s NHS Staff Community enables healthcare organisations to have a continuous dialogue with their employees. It provides a personalised, interactive platform to listen to, engage and communicate with staff, wherever they are located, whenever they log on and whatever device they use. As well as building strong communities, the solution makes it easy to collect and integrate all types of employee feedback – from the annual NHS Staff Survey, to regular pulse, leaver and event-based surveys. The same platform can also be used to collect patient feedback, such as the patient Friends and Family Test, making it simpler to integrate and analyse staff and patient insight, boosting the speed and depth of insight.
Nick Macklin, Director for Workforce and Organisational Development at Somerset Partnership NHS Foundation Trust welcomed the announcement and said:
“I am delighted to be working with Questback at this very important stage in the development of our Trust. At the very time we are engaging with staff on our new values and embedding a new organisational culture, we needed a reliable and effective platform to engage our staff and give them a strong voice in our Trust. With Questback we are creating our own NHS Staff Community where colleagues can engage in forums, vote in surveys and keep themselves updated with the latest Trust news, whatever time they are working. With a dynamic system such as Questback’s NHS Staff Community we can quickly gauge staff views and make changes immediately, giving staff confidence in the Trust and its leaders.
With a new approach to the collection of patient Friends and Family Test data we also hope those benefits can be enjoyed by our patients, their carers and families to give real time feedback on our services. I look forward to working with Questback to help make our Trust as responsive and engaged as possible for patients and staff alike.”
The deployment at Somerset Partnership NHS Foundation Trust follows the successful introduction of Questback’s technology at Northern Devon Healthcare NHS Trust, where staff are using it to share feedback, learn from each other, interact with their peers and provide ideas through the platform’s innovation hub. The two Trusts will work with Questback to share best practice in this area, improving engagement and ultimately patient care.