Project story: Improving satisfaction of staff and stakeholders in forensic receptions

Reception staff at John Howard Centre, a specialist forensic psychiatric services provider in East London, have been working on improving satisfaction levels for service users, visitors and staff. Below is an overview of their journey so far. Words by project lead Mohammad Ramjany.

Our Quality Improvement project has been working towards increasing staff satisfaction, which in turn has impacted positively on all stakeholders experience in reception. Team meetings happen every Fridays at John Howard Centre and will now also happen at Wolfson House (a low secure unit in North London) on some Fridays.

So far, we have managed to increase our standard of competence by ensuring that all staff were fully trained starting from the induction process all the way to maintaining other necessary training i.e. Customer care. We have also been able to come up with staff charters, which are agreements of how to communicate with stakeholders via telephone and face to face together as a team, which now shape our practise. We have professionally engaged with all our stakeholders which in turn gave us a sense of team spirit, good working environment and a positive shift in our reputation.

We are listening, we are caring and we are taking steps to improving our customer care service. We have also generated scenarios based on the feedback that we have received from our stakeholders and turned them into training materials for future use. Directorate Management Team members have stationed themselves in reception control room to observe staff in action.We have introduced a satisfaction huddle after which we generate plans to avoid dissatisfaction.

If you are part of ELFT, you can learn more about the details of this project on LifeQI. Project code: #107169