Top marks for care home following patient led survey

The programme, run by Four Seasons Health Care, has helped many of its homes to achieve an averaging of over 97 per cent in satisfaction rating in feedback from residents and their relatives.

The initiative has won an award at the recent Customer Service Awards.It was chosen by the judges ahead of more than 750 companies across all sectors of industry and commerce. The programme was also winner in the award category for “Insight and Feedback – A Focus on Understanding.”

John Kirk, Regional Managing Director for Four Seasons Health Care, said: “It is a huge endorsement for our Quality of Life programme to have been selected as the best customer experience programme in the UK and it’s a credit to the people in our care teams, including those at Campsie View who have used it to listen to the residents in our homes and act on their feedback to make them happier.”

The Quality of Life Programme uses technology that is exclusive to Four Seasons’ care homes. Residents, their families and health professionals can use iPads that are programmed with a touch-screen questionnaire linked to purpose-designed software systems to tell the company what they think about any aspect of care. The information is transmitted instantly to the Home Manager and Regional Manager. This is very different from the paper-based surveys conducted across the industry once or twice a year, where feedback is usually out of date by the time it is collated.

John Kirk said: “This feedback has enabled our care teams to find and fix issues or niggles. Most of these are little things which make a big difference to someone’s daily life. They have included always cutting the rind off someone’s bacon, changing the time someone’s medication is delivered, re-decorating a room to a resident’s taste, giving a choice of two meats for the Sunday roast. When the majority of our residents are of the generation who don’t like to make a fuss, our Quality of Life Programme has helped us to uncover customer needs that they might otherwise not have expressed.”

The home has also been rated as “very good” by the Care Inspectorate.

Neil Copping, host of the Customer Experience Awards, said: “It is the first time that a company in the care sector has won this award and I think it is very significant because, while quality of care is most important, there is more to giving people living in care homes the best customer experience. Four Seasons understands this and is embedding a customer focus and service culture in its homes that has resulted in increased levels of customer satisfaction.”

The UK Customer Experience Awards are judged by panels of independent business men and women, using scoring methodology and criteria, endorsed by Cranfield School of Management.