Designing services for our patients
Designing services for our patients
Designing services with care so our patients come first
Our aim is to provide you with the best experience and care. We do that in a variety of ways, including by:
- Consulting an independent group of consumer voice experts who champion the patient experience.
- Involving patients in our healthcare service design through a human-centred design approach.
- Using patient experience surveys to gather feedback from recently discharged patients.
- Measuring and comparing net promoter score performance at each of our hospitals.
Our National Consumer Council
Our National Consumer Council (NCC) is tasked with helping us continually improve the quality of patient experience and care at Southern Cross Healthcare. Individually, its members contribute healthcare, design, cultural, and general consumer expertise, and together they form an independent voice that champions the patient experience at our hospitals.
Kataraina Davis
Māori service design specialist from Maurea Consulting Limited’s Te Kaa programme
Kataraina is of Ngāti Whātua and Ngāti Hine descent. She is a design thinker with a passion for ensuring a culturally responsive way of being and working. She works to bring together people from all over Aotearoa, from different walks of life, from diverse organisations, and who have a range of expertise and skill sets, in order to make sense of the complex challenges we face in New Zealand.
Rosaleen Robertson
Consumer advisor
As executive sponsor and chair, Rosaleen was the driving force behind establishing the NCC’s predecessor, the Consumer Advisory Council, in 2014. She led the successful work of the Council through to 2019. We are fortunate to retain Rosaleen in her current role as consumer advisor, to which she brings a wealth of institutional and health sector experience.
Simon Hertnon
Plain language specialist
Simon is an author and educator who is passionate about lifting writing skills. He regularly helps us refine the language we use to ensure our documents and communications are clear, concise, and compelling for healthcare consumers and our stakeholders. Simon is an Associate at Wellington Uni-Professional (formerly Victoria University Professional and Executive Development) where he helps knowledge workers to achieve more from their expertise by teaching them how to write crisply and clearly.
Brigid Mills
Consumer advisor
Brigid brings her past nursing and medico-legal experience. Her most recent role was Legal Advisor at Counties Manukau District Health Board. Continuing the tradition of a NCC voice on the National Clinical Governance Committee, Brigid is a member of both forums.
In addition to the standing members above, the NCC is supported by ad hoc invitees drawn from wider business functions and other external advisors.
A collaborative approach to healthcare service design
Human-centred design (also known as co-design) is a process by which service providers and consumers work together with expert designers to improve a service. Our National Consumer Council champions this process.
It is a collaborative approach used in multiple settings around the world. We are committed to increasingly adopting human-centred design at Southern Cross Healthcare because bringing patients into the design process results in services that respond more sensitively to patient and whānau needs. One example of this is our "blood clots and You" brochure which was developed using human-centred design.
If you would like to help us improve our services, we would love to hear from you. We are always looking for ways to improve the patient experience and there are different ways you can be involved.
Understanding the patient experience
Patient experience surveys
We invite our patients to complete a voluntary survey after their discharge. This is a chance for them to share their experience of our care, the hospital environment and our amenities, while these are still fresh in their mind.
If survey feedback indicates we need to review a service or facility, we can take action. Survey responses also enable us to measure the effectiveness of the continuous improvements we are making to our service design.
We report on patient experience feedback targets to our Board and use the national average across Cemplicity’s other New Zealand clients as a basis for comparison.
Net promoter score measurement
The net promoter score (NPS) metric measures the willingness of our patients to recommend us to their friends and families. It provides a gauge of our patients’ loyalty and engagement, based on their response to the question: “How likely would you be to recommend our hospital to your friends and family?’ from 1 (highly unlikely) to 10 (highly likely).
The NPS will range from -100 to +100 and is calculated as follows:
Our NPS performance
NPS scores are continuously monitored by our hospital and national teams. Performance is reviewed in the context of the wider feedback we receive from our patients and their whānau. We compare NPS scores between our own hospitals, and with other private surgical providers who also use the Cemplicity survey.
Compared with sixteen surgical providers in New Zealand and abroad who use the same survey, NPS’s ranging from 73 to 92 across the group, Southern Cross Healthcare consistently ranks in the top percentile with an average NPS of 90 across our hospital network.
Why NPS is important to us
Measuring our NPS score allows us to keep track of:
- How each Southern Cross hospital is performing
- How our entire network of wholly owned hospitals are performing
- How our performance compares to other private surgical providers
By continuously seeking feedback about our patients’ experiences, we can identify opportunities to improve our services and confirm what is working well.
Knowing that a high percentage of our patients would recommend our hospitals to their friends and family confirms to us that our patient-centric approach to service design is succeeding in its aims.