New Machines Help Hospital Staff

17 June 2011, 06:00

Doctors and nurses at a Thames Valley Hospital will now be able to change their practices immediately if you're not happy with the way you're treated.

The Royal Berkshire Hospital trust have spent £35,000 installing nine new computerised machines where you can tell them your hospital experience there and then. Before they just did one survey a year with a small sample of patients. 

The machines are bright orange and are across three sites. They'll compliment other surveys the hospital carry out on patient satisfaction.

In a statement, the hospital told us:

"These give us the opportunity to hear comments and feedback from as many of our patients and their families as possible. To give you something to compare it to - it costs us and other Trusts nationally around £5000 each year to take part in the annual inpatient survey; this is a one-off general Trust survey whereas the kiosks give us instant results everyday that we can relate to specific, and more varied, wards and departments."

So far, the machines have fed back comments about noise at night on the wards, which Deputy Chief Nurse Melanie Rogers says has been taken on board. The immediacy of the new system means that these issues can be fixed.