Monica Tucker | Patient and storyteller
This is my story of how a patient can use feedback systems like Care Opinion to be more than a victim of circumstance and to champion change to improve outcomes for future patients.
At 27, I was loving my life of travel, dog walking and working full-time as a medical technician, when one day I felt a lump in my neck. After a harrowing two months of scans, biopsies and eventually excisional surgery I received the diagnosis of Hodgkins Lymphoma (a type of blood cancer).
However, I only learnt my diagnosis after asking the testing facility to fax my GP the results and she informed me. The surgical clinic where I was a patient missed multiple phone appointments with me and never followed up to reschedule me, the result being it took far longer than recommended by the healthcare guidelines to refer me for cancer treatment as my condition worsened. Eventually, a junior doctor called me with my results and we got to talking about how their clinic was run, how the junior doctors were both on-call and expected to run results clinics in the middle of being pulled away for emergencies. This meant it was hard to review results and keep appointments with patients on time, which multiple staff members were concerned with.
However it was difficult for junior staff to have their concerns heard, and as someone who has worked in the medical system, I knew how tough a position this is to be in. Here we realised there was room for improvement within the clinic.
Session title: Who is the feedback system for? My experience influencing change
After hearing from Monica, you will walk away with an understanding of why a person would choose to share a story anonymously, what they hope the get from the process and what impact seeing a change made has had.
Watch Monica's presentation here: