NHS North East London wants to ensure services are providing high-quality care along with the best possible care and outcomes for patients, follow up-to-date best practice, reflect the changing needs of our population, and reduce health inequalities. We are constantly reviewing our services and contracts to ensure they are always of high quality.
We are reviewing the current NHS 111 service in north east London – the service is currently provided by London Ambulance Service.
We want to ensure the service supports local people accessing urgent care services, ensuring they receive the best care in the right place, at the right time. As part of this work, we want to understand what currently works well, what doesn’t work well and what needs to change to meet the needs of local people.
We are at the early stages of this and no changes to contracts or decisions have been made.
We are committed to ensuring patient experience and voice feed into this work alongside input from clinicians and providers. We have looked at detailed feedback received from people that have used the service over the last couple of years.
The main themes that came through were:
- Level of support and quality
There was a very high level of satisfaction for both support and quality overall.
- Communication support and behaviour
There was feedback about much good communication and attitude. This included positive examples from people with autism and learning disabilities who had some good experiences of being communicated with sensitively and appropriately. However, when things don’t go as well as they should, communication and attitude is the thing most often identified as the problem.
- Promptness
People fed back that there was much prompt support and treatment. However, when there are delays – people fed back that they felt these can cause distress and risk.
- Joined up healthcare
NHS 111 does a great job to support services at GP practices and urgent and emergency healthcare to be more joined up for better patient care. However, this can always be improved and people had lots of constructive suggestions to help with improvements.
How you can get involved
We put out a call in the NHS North East London People’s Panel newsletter – which was sent to over 2,000 people in north east London who have signed up as interested to participate in health engagement. We will be working with the reference group to identify further participation opportunities going forwards. If you would like to hear more about these, please sign up to the People’s Panel newsletter.
Next steps
The findings from the group, along with other feedback, best practice and information, will inform our approach. We will continue to collect feedback on our proposals and adapt to respond to the needs of our people and communities in north east London.
We will also be engaging with the public for their feedback and opinions in the coming months, and we will ensure we regularly update our website with information.
If you would like to hear about any updates on this programme, please sign up to the People’s Panel newsletter.
