Transcript of video - Susan Pearce - Elevating the human experience Susan Pearce, Deputy Secretary, Patient Experience and System Performance: Hi everyone. It's an absolute pleasure to tell you all today that we are launching, after much preparation, our Elevating the Human Experience - Our Guide to Action for NSW Health.
This work is a culmination of over a year of consultation across the system, both with, most importantly of course, patients, carers and their families, as well as the wonderful staff of the NSW health system.
What do we, what can we say about 2020? Well it's the perfect time really to be launching this work across our system because now more than ever, kindness and compassion is needed for all of us, both for our staff and for our patients, and for our whole community.
We've experienced over the course of the last months, bushfires, and of course we've been dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, really since January, and the amount of work that our system has required to undertake to deliver the results for NSW has been really, really immense.
So you know, what we're trying to achieve through this guide is that when we experience care in our health system, it's not just about clinical care. It's about every single element of that experience when someone enters a hospital or a health service, it's not just about the clinical staff, it's about all of the staff in our health system that deliver those results to our patients. And that is including of course, clerical staff, all of the support staff, through hospitals who can make such a difference to someone's experience of their care.
For me personally, as the Deputy Secretary responsible for patient experience in NSW, many of you all know that I've been committed to improving experience for many years, and reflecting back on small acts of kindness, which I collaborated on and made when I was the Chief Nursing and Midwifery Officer back in 2013. It is a wonderful achievement, both for myself, my team and for the Ministry of Health and all of our partners, including our pillar agencies and our local health districts, to be delivering this really important message to our system in a year that has challenged us like no other.
This builds on a lot of work that's underway already, we've got great programs of work, now more than patient experience officers across NSW Health in emergency departments, who are out there every day making that experience in the emergency department waiting room, and that transit through our system, that much better for people. And the feedback from that program has been absolutely exceptional.
So really what this is about is building on the work already underway, not to overtake it, or to change course necessarily, but to signify the importance of what we want to do and deliver as a health system in NSW. There's nothing more important than how you feel about the care that you receive. It's every bit as important as the actual clinical result itself. And I look forward to continuing to work with the wonderful NSW health system as we build on this work in the coming years.