Niagara Health’s Walker Family Cancer Centre, in partnership with Cancer Care Ontario, has launched Your Voice Matters, an innovative tool that enables the experiences of cancer patients to be captured and measured in real time.
This new tool will be implemented across Ontario’s Regional Cancer Programs, empowering patients to be engaged in their care by sharing feedback at every stage of their visit.
The data collected through Your Voice Matters will be used to enhance and drive meaningful improvements to processes, systems and services associated with the patient experience. Real-time reporting makes it possible to assess opportunities for improvement and implement changes based on what is meaningful to patients, thereby increasing the efficiency and quality of care and ultimately enhancing the patient experience.
“We continuously strive to deliver high-quality care to every patient who visits our centre,” says Dr. Janice Giesbrecht, Niagara Health’s Medical Director of Oncology.
“Collecting feedback from patients engages them in their care and helps us make meaningful changes to enhance the experience patients have with our centre,” adds Brenda Luscombe, Niagara Health’s Director of Oncology and Ambulatory Care.
Patients provide feedback
Your Voice Matters takes less than five minutes to complete. Kiosks and tablets are available at Walker Family Cancer Centre to offer a number of ways for cancer patients to share their experiences following their interactions with their care teams.
The questions follow a patient’s typical sequence of events, prompting patients to provide feedback on their experiences with booking an appointment, registering with the centre upon arrival, waiting for the appointment, quality of service and overall experience.
“This is the goal of healthcare in Ontario – putting patients at the centre of their care,” says Dr. Simron Singh, Provincial Head, Person-Centred Care, Cancer Care Ontario. “Collecting and measuring patient experience data helps improve the lives of Ontarians by enabling patients, healthcare providers and administrators to shape the cancer system based on what’s important to patients.”
Your Voice Matters was created by Cancer Care Ontario to identify measures to improve the delivery of responsive and respectful care by optimizing individuals’ quality of life. The tool directly captures a range of real-time, patient-reported information that is meaningful to patients to improve the quality of care based on the needs, wants and preferences of patients and their families.
Walker Family Cancer Centre is one of the 13 Cancer Programs in Ontario to implement Your Voice Matters. The initiative was piloted at five regional cancer centres in 2015 to assess the needs of patients prior to implementing it at every centre in Ontario.
For media inquiries, please contact:
Steven Gallagher, Communications Specialist, Niagara Health
Phone: 905-378-4647, ext. 43879 or 289-696-6767
Email: steven.gallagher@niagarahealth.on.ca
Cancer Care Ontario
Phone: 1.855.460.2646
Email: media@cancercare.on.ca
