Newcastle Hospitals Respiratory Service is a pulmonary rehabilitation (PR) service, who were accredited in 2023, and have recently completed their first annual review with PRSAS (Pulmonary Rehabilitation Services Accreditation Scheme). An area the team has been continuously congratulated on is their patient involvement and focus that has been embedded within their PR service. Patient safety day took place on 17 September, so to celebrate this and recognise the great work this team has done, we spoke with the team about what patient safety and PRSAS means to them!

What does patient safety mean to your service and why do you think it’s important?  

To us as a service, patient safety means providing a framework of quality processes and procedures that lowers or eliminates risk for all patients. We want all our patients to feel supported and listened to when in our care and patient safety is at the heart of this!

You received multiple congratulations on your patient involvement throughout your PRSAS assessment – what are the different ways you involve patients within your service?  

For many years we have had a patient satisfaction questionnaire given to patients on completion of their treatment. This is anonymous and the results are analysed regularly to review trends and identify areas of improvement.

We re-designed this whilst undertaking PR accreditation to ensure it encompassed all aspects required for the PRSAS standards, whilst also being conscious that the questions are easy to understand by our patient cohort. We also have annual focus groups, 2024 will be our third year of undertaking this.

Could you please tell us a little bit about the patient focus groups your service has developed?  

To delve a little deeper into what our patients think about the PR service we run, we have embedded an annual focus group within our processes. With support, our band 5’s lead this as part of their project, which we ensure takes place annually, aiming for a few months before our PRSAS annual review.

We invite around 10 patients and ensure we do one focus group session for each site that we run PR classes at. We also encourage carers or family members are to attend and share their experiences. In order to make this as accessible as possible for patients, we provide refreshments and transport for patients if needed.

We do have a pre-prepared list of questions on areas we want to know more about but also ensure we allow the conversations to flow. Although the patients enjoy the programme, it has been helpful to look deeper into what areas we are able to improve on. We ensure to take notes, so we are able to analyse the information and outline what changes are feasible for our service. This then helps to shape our QI plan for the upcoming year and is added to our annual operational plan. All patients who help us are sent a letter thanking them and outlining what plans we have undertaken as a result of the focus group - a ‘You Said, We Did’ style approach.  

The process has been valuable to our service and has helped to highlight areas that the team had not considered.

Could you give us some examples on how these focus groups have helped shape your PR service?

We now have a short video to inform patients about our PR service and what to expect as patients in the focus group thought this would be useful, which is given alongside our information booklet to understand what the service entails before starting a PR programme. We have also developed a more detailed discharge booklet for onward exercise in the local area. These are two important aspects the patient felt would help them to feel more comfortable going into a PR programme, and after discharge.

Any tips for people reviewing their patient involvement whilst going through accreditation?  

We really recommend involving the whole team to help – it’s a big task for just one person. Our support staff have enjoyed helping with some of the standards as embedding meaningful change to help the service and patients.

Plan ahead and ensure you act on what you discover – there’s no point undertaking patient feedback if there’s no action. Bearing in mind, not all suggestions from patients can be implemented so prioritise and ensure that the changes being made add to the quality of the PR service you are running.

From your perspective, how does PRSAS help positively impact patient safety?

PRSAS has given us the opportunity to reflect and improve on all aspects of our service and by meeting the core PRSAS standards we can now confidently say that we provide an excellent standard of patient care. We wear our accreditation status as a badge of honour – any patient coming to us for pulmonary rehabilitation now knows with confidence that we are providing a safe environment for them and are committed to delivering a quality-led service with patient safety at it’s centre.

Thank-you to the team at Newcastle Hospitals Respiratory Service for discussing the important of patient safety within pulmonary rehabilitation and giving us an insight into how they have embedded this into their processes as part of their PR accreditation!

To read more about the PRSAS standards, please visit our websiteor reach out to us via pulmrehab@rcp.ac.uk