Know Your Service

For this unit, we are going to explore the idea of getting to know your service. I want you to spend time now thinking about who uses your service. And we are going to work out how you know that because it is important that we understand what groups of your local community actually use your service and then what kind of experience do they have when they use your service. Do they feel that they are always treated with respect? We need to find out whether everybody who uses your service manages to have the same positive outcomes as a result of using your service.

So, your challenge is, I would like you to study this graphic here. As you can see in the first column, it is all about the different groups that you have already identified exist in your community. So I am just going to make some up for examples. I would imagine that you would automatically identify gender, men and women, as groups. I would also hope that you would look at the ethnicity breakdown of your local community population and have them listed under your groups. You might also have discovered that your area has a particularly high need of deprivation in some areas, so I would hope that you would have families with low socio-economic indexes on that list too, okay.

So once you have got all your groups in your left-half column, I want you to move along, thinking of one group at a time. And the first section asks you about access. How accessible is your service to this particular group? So, let us imagine that we are in any-town and we are running a GP service. How accessible is that GP service to men? How accessible is it to women? How do you know this? This is the crucial part of this process. You have got to be able to evidence how you know this. So you might have to start digging up some of your own statistics, your monitoring and evaluation statistics, your referral lists, your service user satisfaction surveys, anywhere where you can start to get information on people's experience of your service. If you don't have these types of statistics available, then I think it is really important that you start processes where you can start collecting that information, because you cannot make objective assessments about your service until you have got this information.

So, let us carry on with our any-town GP service and look at the access for men. Maybe the GP service is not open at a time when lots of men are available. I am just guessing now, but we would have to expect that most men would be working, therefore, we'd really want the opening hours to extend beyond the normal nine to five. It would be really interesting when you look at your patient list whether there are 50% men and 50% women, or do you have more women on your patient listless men? You would have to start asking yourself, "Why is that the case? What is it that's making men not access our service as easily?"

Other issues around access can include things like the language that you use. It can include things like how it is advertised, as well as physical attributes of accessibility. Is your building accessible? Can people walk by and walk in? Is it wheelchair accessible? People with buggies? We need to think of all the aspects of access. And also, since July 2016, there's an Accessible Information Standard that has been put in place for all services that deliver for the NHS and adult social care. And this means that all information that is important to people as individuals that either has a physical disability, a sensory loss, or some kind of learning disability, that information is put into such a way that they are happy to communicate with you. So it is very important that all organisations do check out that their information is accessible and meets the standards. There is a website address here for you to go to.

Let us carry on with the table and move along from access to treatment. This bit is all about the kind of treatment that people receive when they are interacting with your service. Are they treated with respect? Or are they feeling that their needs have been met? Are the staff group trained and confident in dealing with different groups of the community that come through their doors? This is where the feedback from the service users will be important, and any customer satisfaction surveys that you have completed. And also things like complaints procedures will be important because you need to evidence why you think people are receiving the treatment that you think they are actually receiving when they come to your service.

So the final column looks at service. This is all about the different outcomes that people receive when they access your service. So, if we are with any-town GP surgery, let us imagine our groups of men and women. When men leave the surgery, do they always feel that they have received the right treatment for their ailment? When women leave the surgery, do they always feel that they have had a positive outcome for their visit? What you hope to see is that everybody has relatively positive outcomes, but sometimes when you start looking at these things group by group by group, you can identify that some groups have more positive outcomes and some groups have less, and that can be for a range of different reasons whether it is about staff training or staff understanding, or whether it is just about the individuals within the group not really understanding the service that they have received. Either way, it should raise flags for you and enable you to identify what we are going to do differently to ensure that each group that comes through our surgery doors has a positive outcome as a result of the service they receive.