A year of What Matters to You? at East and North Hertfordshire NHS Trust

Read the annual report of the WMTY team to learn how they supported patient and carer experience.

With great thanks to Lauren Butterfield, What Matters To You Volunteer Coordinator, and Tracey Van Wyk, Head of Continuous Quality Improvement, at NHS East and North Hertfordshire for inviting the ALLIANCE’s Tommy Whitelaw to host our You Make A Difference sessions to the team. It has been a privilege to meet with everyone, and discuss the values of What Matters to You? (this link will take you away from our website).

It is great to see the incredible work of the team captured in their newly published annual report for the what matters to you team. You can access the full report here .

Thanks to the team, and a few words from them:

“In 2021-2022 we set up and ran the ‘what matters to you?’ volunteer team. This was in response to several things happening:

– Visiting remained restricted due to infection prevention and control of Covid-19

– Demand for acute services was high

– Capacity was often affected by isolation required for Covid positive staff members

– Well-being of the teams was a consideration due to the pandemic and the resulting stress levels inside and outside of work

We acknowledged all of these factors may have an impact on patient and carer experience. To this end we set up the ‘what matters to you?’ team with the help of funding for a band 5 coordinator from the East and North Hertfordshire Charity. The coordinator was to set up a team of volunteers who were going to do three things:

– Book and carry out virtual visiting

– What matters to you conversations- Ask, listen and do what was within their remit and handover to the clinical teams if this was outside of their remit

– Data collection for improvement- support the collection of FFT data and what matters to you data in order to drive patient and carer experience projects

You can read our full report with examples of our work here”