Community Health Services Research

Our aim was to gain feedback from 200 local patients about CHS in Ealing and to find out what feedback and/or complaints they have about services they receive. Our objective was to understand the complaints and feedback policies at CHS, and to ascertain whether these have been publicised, and whether service users have been encouraged to give feedback and make complaints. We wanted to identify any service issues at CHS in Ealing. We aimed to increase HWE understanding and intelligence on a range of CHS, ensuring coverage of adult, children & young people, and mental health services. We then aimed to analyse the data and summarise the views expressed by patients in a robust report.

A purpose-designed English-language questionnaire was used to collect information from service users. Feedback was received from 218 service users at various CHS locations.

A focus group was held to present the overall findings of the research project and to develop recommendations to improve knowledge of feedback and complaints processes at CHS and to address the issues highlighted in the findings.

This report is comprised of two main sections. The first section (pages 8 – 28) details overall findings for the CHS in general around issues such as users’ knowledge of feedback and complaints procedures, users’ ratings of different aspects of each service, and their additional comments. The second section looks at each individual CHS detailing the service-specific findings and comments received from service users.

Findings indicated that the vast majority of service users are unaware of how to give feedback and make complaints at CHS. We also identified that most service users are happy with the care they receive at CHS in Ealing. Issues with the referral process, ease of gaining appointments, waiting times and phone access at CHS were identified.

Recommendations discussed at the focus group include:

• Make service users more aware of the distinction between feedback and complaints. Ensure both terms are explained adequately to make it easier for people to understand
• Development of more engaging visual aids – posters, banners and leaflets
• To address the issues with the referral process, service users should be given a referral timeline and should be kept up-to-date with any changes to the timeline