Involving you in our work

As the only pan-London NHS Trust, we are in a unique position to involve a diverse range of patients and members of the public from a wide variety of areas and communities.

Our aims

We are committed to patient and public involvement (PPI) and aim to involve patients and the public in all our key developments, as well as through public education and other activities such as public fairs and events.

We aim to provide services that meet the needs and expectations of our patients and the public, but also to learn from them and enable them to influence our strategic direction and service developments.

Our plan and strategy

Our Patient Engagement Strategy sets out our current aims and priorities to conduct PPI activity in a meaningful and consistent way.

It is a challenge to undertake patient engagement in a large, diverse city. However, these challenges also present us with an opportunity to make a real difference, through our PPI and public education activities, to patients and carers, partner organisations, staff and  networks in London and nationally.

Examples of our patient involvement activities include:

• Members of our Patients’ Forum  and other service user representatives attend all our key committees.
• We have involved patients and the public in the design of new ambulances.
• We involved people with learning disabilities in the development of staff training packages.
• People with learning disabilities have helped us to develop a telephone prompt booklet that gives them advice about what to do when they are hurt or feeling unwell.
• We have involved deaf people in the development of a 999 emergency text messaging service.
• We have involved patients with spinal injuries in the design of our new ambulances.
• We are working with mental health service users to develop a new action plan for mental health.

Finding out people’s views

One aspect of PPI is finding out what patients and the public think of our services. We carry out surveys and consultations to find out people’s views and experiences. Recent projects include:

• The Insight Project was funded by NHS England. It consisted of five focus groups, each independently facilitated and attended by patients, carers and London Ambulance Service staff. Each meeting followed a slightly different approach, depending on the group and the issues raised. The report can be viewed here.
• The RNIB (the Royal National Institute for Blind people) was commissioned to undertake a patient survey focused on blind and partially-sighted people’s experiences of using ambulance services and, more generally, on the factors which affected their level of trust in strangers. The report can be viewed here.
• As a recommendation from the sickle cell clinical audit we produced an article for the Sickle Cell Society (SCS) detailing the care patients should receive when presenting in a crisis. The report can be viewed here.

We continue to encourage patients to tell us about the care they have received so we can make improvements. If you would like to make any comments please contact our Patient Experience Team.