Hospital patients can now use the WOW! factor
Patients receiving treatment from Plymouth Hospitals NHS Trust (PHNT) can now nominate a staff member for an award when they have gone above and beyond what would be expected of them and have provided an excellent service.
A new initiative known as The WOW! Awards, begins tomorrow (Tuesday 6 May 2014) and will run in pilot form at PHNT until the end of October this year.
The WOW! Awards are a way of recognising the hard work and commitment provided by staff and allows patients to publically say ‘thank you’ to a staff member or team. Nominations are easy to do and can be as short or as long as the patient likes. Areas of care that a patient could nominate are for include a staff member’s compassion and kindness or perhaps their respect for the patients dignity.
All nominations are considered by a national team and the winners will receive a certificate delivered personally by a member of the PHNT Board. The nominations can also be shared on the Trust’s internal and external websites. Staff can also nominate their colleagues for an award.
Leah Brooks, from the Organisational Development team at PHNT said, “Plymouth Hospitals NHS Trust staff have always aimed to deliver a first class service to patients and are committed to high quality care. The WOW! Awards is an important way to “catch people doing things right”, and the best judges of great service are most definitely our patients.
“If patients leave our care thinking ‘WOW!’ then we would ask them to tell the people who cared for them about the positive impact they made by forwarding them for a nomination”.
Information posters and leaflets for patients on the WOW! awards are being distributed throughout the hospital. Nominations can be made online at www.plymouthhospitals.nhs.uk/wow or through the hospital’s Twitter feed @WOWAwardsatPHNT
Nomination forms can also be collected from the Main Reception desk on Level 6.
The WOW! Awards is an organisation which recognises outstanding customer service based purely on customer nominations.
Founded in 1997, The WOW! Awards are used by a wide variety of UK organisations in both public and private sectors. Users include utilities, local government, police forces, NHS hospitals, contact centres, financial services, housing associations, retail, manufacturing and financial services. The organisation exists to empower customers with a formal way of saying "thank you" when they have received great service. This gives The WOW! Awards the credibility of being independent from the organisations that use it.
The nominations can be used for benchmarking, identifying key characteristics of best practice and as a basis for future training.
