Enter and View: St Peter’s Hospital Emergency Department and Same Day Emergency Care report – November 2024

We decided to carry out an Enter and View visit to Ashford and St Peter’s NHS Foundation Trust (ASPH) following patient feedback that we’d received and discussions we’d been part of with Surrey Heartlands and NHS England relating to the Accident and Emergency (A&E)/Emergency Department (ED) at St Peter’s in particular.

As well as wanting to speak to patients, family members and carers about their experience of care, we wanted to understand how improvements were being felt based on our previous visit in October 2023, where we highlighted the need for patients to be better able to share feedback directly with the hospital.

We spoke to 80 people about their experience of emergency care across 4 visits.

Executive Summary

• People are generally understanding of the pressures on the NHS staff and so are not expecting major changes to be made.
• We heard generally that staff attitudes are very good, most people told us staff had shown kindness and a caring attitude.
• Patients would benefit from clear, consistent signage on the hospital site to help them navigate to the right place. Some people found it difficult to find their way to Same Day Emergency Care (SDEC).
• Patients would benefit from better management of the queue for the navigation nurse in the Emergency Department (ED) at busy times. On 1 of our visits people were waiting 50-60 minutes to see the navigation nurse.
• Most people across ED and SDEC knew what was going to happen next, although there was some frustration with waiting times for test results.
• People’s experiences were mainly positive across the course of our visits however, they were more negative during our visits at busier times.
• More could be done to encourage patients to share feedback directly – the Viewpoint posters in ED, QR code in SDEC, and PALS details were not very visible.
• Not everyone knew about the availability of refreshments in SDEC.
• We heard about some issues with parking.

We made 8 recommendations.

The response to these recommendations is attached (if you require this as a word version rather than the attached pdf, please get in touch).