Hearing Impairment and Visual Impairment

(asked on 18th October 2017) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, whether he plans to respond to the recommendations on patient-led assessments of core environments relating to people who are hearing or sight-impaired of the Action Plan on Hearing Loss, published on 23 March 2015.


Answered by
Jackie Doyle-Price Portrait
Jackie Doyle-Price
This question was answered on 23rd October 2017

NHS England is actively involving patients in assessing healthcare providers’ performance against a range of criteria and identifying how services may be improved for the future. The Patient-Led Assessments of the Care Environment (PLACE) programme focuses on the areas which patients say matter in the non-clinical environment which impact on the patient experience of care: cleanliness; the condition, appearance and maintenance of healthcare premises; the extent to which the environment supports the delivery of care with privacy and dignity; and the quality and availability of food and drink.

NHS England is developing the PLACE assessments for future years to make the assessments more patient-led by adjusting the balance between patient assessors and staff assessors. In addition, questions will be developed within PLACE to focus on the needs of people with hearing and/or sight loss. This will allow the National Health Service to capture whether, where and how the experience of care is poorer for people who are hearing and/or sight impaired, and if scores for this group are poor, principles of good practice will be identified to help organisations improve.

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