The St Mary's Patient Experience Hub is a partnership between ICCESS and the Imperial Health Charity that commenced in 2016. We're developing the Hub as a means of utilising our medical simulation tools and skills to develop improved approaches to care and improve the experience of patients at St Mary’s Hospital.
The Hub has four work themes and will be home to a number of simulation-based projects.
Work themes
- Systems of Care: Redesigning patient-centred care pathways using Sequential Simulation (SqS)
- Processes of care: Improving patient experience throughout invasive clinical procedures
- Education for Care: Placing patients’ perspectives at the centre of clinical education for healthcare professionals
- Engagement for Care: Adding value to the Charity’s work through our experience in designing customised simulation
Hub activity
Sharing Approaches to Maternity Services (SAMS) Patient Engagement Event - 21st November 2016
The first event of our Sharing Approaches to Maternity Services project was held at St Mary’s Hospital in front of an audience consisting of St Mary’s mothers and maternity staff. The event sought to engage mothers in exploring the maternity care pathway to gain their personal perspectives and inform the design of the rest of the project.
A Sequential Simulation (SqS) that compressed a nine month maternity pathway into 30 minutes was delivered at the event. The simulation featured a GP surgery, maternity clinic and ultrasound clinic (see image below). We anticipated that the simulation would encourage mothers to remember their own experiences of the journey along the maternity care pathway which could then be captured during the subsequent discussion.
The discussion generated themes around the lack of continuity of care during pregnancy, inconsistencies in the information given and the way in which it is provided, lack of social support, time pressures during clinical interactions, and too many or too few appointments. These themes have been incorporated into the development of the following simulations, meaning that St Mary’s mothers have had a direct input into the design of our project to map North West London’s maternity services.
