Patients and carers are crucial to help us shape the care we provide to our communities in the future and we are looking for those who have used our services to become part of speciality groups at our Trust.

This is an exciting opportunity for them to give their valuable insight and perspective as part of the Speciality Patient Experience groups. The areas covered include medicine, emergency, surgery, women’s health, maternity, and children and young people, support services and corporate services.

Representatives of these groups will work with our services across the specialities to represent the voice of hospital patients. Any patient or carer who has accessed services within the Trust during 2021 and 2022 is invited to apply to be part of one of the groups.

We would love to hear from you if you can commit approximately three hours a month to support the work. For more information please email sath.patientexperience@nhs.net or contact 01743 261000 ext 3032. The closing date for applications is Thursday 30 June 2022.

Earlier this month we held our fourth User Experience workshop in Maternity, the theme of which was ‘Respected and Supported Decision Making’.

The workshop focused on feedback from service users and their families of their experiences of respected and supported decision making while being cared for by our Maternity service, received through the Maternity Voices Partnership Shropshire and Telford & Wrekin.

Feedback provided has been formed into actions and will now shape improvements and developments within the service and help us to identify areas of change, such as looking at the way we communicate and how we keep support partners informed.

The User Experience system was launched at SaTH last year and puts the voices of women and their families at the heart of improvements within our Maternity Services, helping to ensure real and meaningful change.

We are also appealing to all you knitters out there to help us create blankets for patients at high risk of falls, while they are staying at our hospitals.

Our Falls Prevention Team is looking for people to knit or donate the blankets to use in a trial. It is hoped the blankets will serve as a visual cue to staff that a patient is at greater risk of falls, and therefore requires closer observation.

Blankets need to be bright yellow – the themed colour for falls prevention – and must be approximately 1m x 1m in size with no loose threads.

Donations can be sent to Leeanne Morgan, Falls Prevention Practitioner at Royal Shrewsbury Hospital. For more information please email leeanne.morgan@nhs.net

Saturday (2 April) sees the start of the month of Ramadan and we will be thinking of our Muslim colleagues and those in the community who plan to fast for the month. We as a Trust will be working to support our colleagues during this time by ensuring they are still taking breaks during their working day and thinking about the best time to have our meetings.

Hayley