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Winners selected for patient insight awards, announced yesterday at a Patient Experience Network ceremony in Birmingham, demonstrate that NHS providers and commissioners are listening to patient feedback and that services are continuing to improve because of it.

The awards in the Friends and Family Test and Patient Insight for Improvement categories have gone to five initiatives that set a gold standard for use of patient and staff insight to shape healthcare and that could be mirrored in other areas to benefit patients across the country.

The categories are designed to highlight work across primary care and other services, initiatives to listen to the views of people who might otherwise be excluded through age or medical conditions, and trusts involved in running Staff FFT.  In addition, an overall winner is selected from the category winners.

The overall winner is Nottingham University Hospital NHS Trust for the Think Drink Project, an initiative in Nottingham to reduce the time that patients have to go without food and drink prior to operations.  They won the Champions Category, which recognises an individual or team who has made the most outstanding contribution to the successful use of FFT and/or other feedback to drive improvement in any NHS-funded service.

Other category winners are:

• Ipswich Hospital NHS Trust (Accessibility Category) for their Frailty Assessment Base, a project linking all the healthcare processes across hospital and community services that are concerned with the frailty needs of older people to help reduce admissions, increase confidence and enable patients to go home;
• Leicester City Clinical Commissioning Group (Primary Care Category) for an insight initiative to understand the health needs of homeless people and asylum seekers in Leicester to better inform the design of primary healthcare services;
• Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust (Staff Category) for their compassion-based training for maternity staff in Northumbria;
• West Leicestershire Clinical Commissioning Group (Other NHS-Funded Services Category) for work to balance the views and needs of patients and staff when redesigning non-urgent patient transport services.

The awards are run by the non-for-profit Patient Experience Network and the FFT and insight categories are supported by NHS England, who are working to encourage providers and commissioners to listen to patients and staff and act on their feedback through initiatives like the Friends and Family Test, a near real-time patient feedback tool, through surveys and through other types of listening exercises.

Dan Wellings, Head of Insight & Feedback, yesterday said: “These awards are a fantastic opportunity to showcase how the NHS is acting on what our patients and users tell us so we continue to improve our services.  We know that any feedback collected is only as good as the people listening to it and today is an opportunity to celebrate the best examples of this.”

Full details are available of all winning projects and shortlisted finalists.

Find out more about insight and feedback work in the NHS and access useful resources.