Redesigning our local blood taking service
NHS Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) is redesigning its blood taking (phlebotomy) service after carrying out a review last year to understand what was good about the current service and what could be improved.
The aim is to design a future model which improves the patient experience and enables people equal access to the same high quality service wherever they live in the county.
As part of the review, the CCG looked at the demand for blood taking and listened to the views and experiences of patients, the public and frontline health care staff.
Learning from this has been used to develop a number of different options for what the future service could look like.
Healthcare staff and people representing the patient voice, along with the CCG, have looked at these options and scored them against a set of essential criteria which reflect what patients, public and staff told us was important to them including patient choice and access, the skillset of the workforce, reducing health inequalities and value for money.
The options that scored the highest are now being checked to make sure they can be delivered using the resources available before asking people what they think to make sure the new service meets the needs and wishes of our population.
Our public survey
We received an amazing number of responses to our public survey with over 3,500 people providing their feedback. All of the feedback has been analysed and key themes identified which we are using to help inform the future service.
The key themes included:
- Of those who responded to the public survey, most people in Shropshire had their blood tested at a GP practice whereas most people in Telford and Wrekin had their blood tested at hospital.
- For those having their blood tested at a GP practice, the top reason was that it was close to them, whereas for those having their blood tested at hospital, the top reason was that they had no other choice.
- Having convenient and accessible locations for blood tests was also a theme that came from our focus groups and health care staff surveys.
- Satisfaction with blood tests was high both during and before the pandemic.
- A very high proportion of respondents were confident in the skills of the person taking their blood, with over 98% indicating they were confident both before and during the pandemic.
- Weekdays were the most popular day for having a blood test and morning the most popular choice of time.
- To arrange an appointment, ‘through your GP practice’ was the most popular choice of method in Shropshire, while online was most popular in Telford and Wrekin.
To read our full public survey report, please click on this link.
Thank you to everyone who has been involved and taken the time to share their views and experiences, we really appreciate and value your input.