Patient feedback plays a vital role at PML. And if you do have comments about your experience it’s Coral Whynes who you’ll speak to about it.

Coral is passionate about taking feedback and making sure it directly influences policy and process changes within the organisation, ensuring continual improvements in service quality.

Plus, Coral shares PML’s commitment to environmental sustainability, highlighting their initiatives to reduce their carbon footprint and maintaining environmentally friendly practices.

If you have any extra questions about your appointment or referral to PML you can get in touch with the team via the Physiological Measurements website physiologicalmeasurements.com

Welcome to the Physiological Measurements podcast for patients who've been referred for an appointment for a scan. I'm Charlotte Foster and I've been taking a look behind the scenes at head office in Shropshire, as well as speaking to one of the sonographers who works in one of the clinics. Throughout this series, I've been finding out about who PML are, the work that they do and what you can expect as a patient. Now, feedback from patients to PML is generally good, but occasionally PML will hear about things that haven't gone as expected. And that's where Coral Whynes comes in. You heard a bit from coral in the first episode. She is the patient experience lead, working into the governance team. So I asked her how important the patient experience is to her.

We hear a lot when sort of dealing with different organisations and different companies that, you know, all your feedback is important. Tell us, tell us. And sometimes it can feel like a bit of a. You know, a bit of a platitude, a bit of like, oh, we're just saying this because we have to say it kind of thing. Is that the reality here, really?

Not actually, because it's something I take quite personally and I think PML do as well. But certainly I do, that each patient needs to feel that they have had their voice heard. You know, they've had an experience that if it's great and it's positive, I love hearing that. But if there's an area that they weren't happy with, it's imperative that we listen to that voice, that we make sure that doesn't happen again. And that's why I phone all the patients as much as I possibly can for any feedback that they provide. I enjoy talking to them and want them to feel that actually, yeah, I'm glad I provided that feedback and PML have taken on board what I've said.

You mentioned that you feed into the governance side of things as well. How does that work?

I work within the governance team, so we also manage all of the policies and the protocols within the organisation. So some of the patient feedback can also link into policy changes, process changes, to the way we do things. I also do incidents, so if there's any incidents in clinics or in the organisation in general, I manage those, carry out investigations, gather statements from different people that were involved in those incidents. And, you know, once we find out what the conclusion is, again, that leads into lessons learned and improvements in our organisation and, you know, onward, continual improvement to improve our service and the training that we deliver to our staff and have assurances that we are delivering our service to a certain standards. You know, keeping the patients at the heart of everything that we do and making sure that our service is of a standard that patients feel that, you know, yeah, they're happy to come back and happy to be referred back. So also, as part of the governance team, we audit internally all of our organisation. So each department will get audited at various times of the year for various different things. It's out of those audits that we have lessons learnt, we identify additional risks for our business. All of these are taken up to our senior management team, who make final decisions and help drive our organisation in a certain direction.

The risks and the incidents all get fed back, as well as the complaints to our directors and our senior management team. So they are all aware of not just what our patients are saying, but also what is going on in our organisation that enables them to decide of the direction they want the business to go in, or any improvements or investments that might be required in the organisation. All of those help our directors and our senior management team make those decisions, really keeping our business safe and effective.

Sounds like the communication between senior management and yourselves is really open as well. Is that fair to say?

Yes, absolutely. It's almost, I would say, a top down, bottom up approach. So the information and the evidence that we gather at audit, or just through patient feedback or complaints and things like that, all of that is fed up to our senior management team. They will make the decisions, they will direct our ship, if you like, and then they will then feed that information, those improvements and things back down, and we will make sure that they are implemented and communicated out to the business. And this could be the change of a protocol, a change of policy and working procedures, anything like that. Additional training, anything that's required. We help get involved with that. As the governance team, we work with all the departments, really.

You know, obviously, as the governance team, you have to kind of work closely with everyone. So we all share information as part of our investigations or audits. We speak to all of the departments, so we all work very well together.

Fabulous. Coral, is there anything else that you'd like to add?

I mean, certainly patient feedback is very key to our improvements in the way we deliver our service. So it's not just through emails that patients can communicate with us, they can, you know, communicate by the telephone. We also ask them to provide feedback after their appointments as well. We send text messages and ask the patient's feedback. Again, this is reviewed on a monthly basis. It's analysed and fed back to our senior management team, what our patients are saying.

Brilliant. It sounds like. Again, it's one of those roles that's going to be really interesting, but challenging and interesting at the same time. Is that fair?

It certainly encompasses a lot of different things, so not just the incidents and complaints. We also manage the environmental aspects as well. We're very environmentally friendly in PML. We currently have our ISO 14,001, which is for the environment. So we make sure we do lots of recycling, we try and look at our carbon footprint and we're in the process of trying to reduce our carbon footprint. At the moment, we work in an environmentally friendly way, ensuring that all of the products that we use and everything within head office especially is recyclable or recycled as much as possible. It's very difficult with some medical products, you know, gloves and things like that, but certainly, you know, with working with the NHS England and people like that and listening to how they're changing things, it’s things that we take on ourselves to ensure that we're improving our carbon footprint.

This is something I've heard a lot through my time hanging around in head offices. This focus on the environment and the environmental impact that the company's making. It's really refreshing to hear.

Yeah. And it's something that we're very, very keen on. We've taken on a new investigation now, a new ISO that we're working towards called ISO 14064 and PAS 2060, which again is about your carbon footprint and how you reduce that. So we're in the process of going for that now. We have environmental green plans that we follow and they are reviewed on an annual basis that we work towards. All of this is just different aspects. We try and see how we can make our business more environmentally friendly and, you know, how we can offset a lot of, you know, the outputs that come from just our general working.

Fabulous. Thank you so much for talking to me.

Thank you to my guests for spending time with me today, and thank you for listening to this episode of the Physiological Measurements podcast. I hope you enjoyed it and you found it useful. You can find out more and get in touch with the team by visiting the website physiologicalmeasurements.com.