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Our feedback from both patients and the volunteering service within Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust suggest that this could work well. Apparently in Airedale they routinely use patients to gather 'experience' feedback from wards. However, there are particular issues with safety feedback in particular…. what happens if patients disclose information about sensitive issues within the wards? How would staff react to this? Also, I think there is an issue about anonymity… our research suggests that patients like to keep feedback anonymous. But what if volunteers learn about incidents that have or could harm the patient? What is our safety net?

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You are right Rosie, the safety net – i.e. the system put in place to ensure that important clinical information is shared with wards in a timely fashion – is critical to the success (or otherwise) of using patient volunteers in collecting safety related data. The Airedale NHS Foundation Trust uses patient volunteers to collect patient experience data, which is qualitatively different from safety data – which may need to be fed back to wards immediately if judged to be an immediate threat to the patient's safety or the safety of others. With patients reporting safety data, in our experience this situationis infrequent, but regular, therefore underlining the need to suuply volunteers with clear guidance in collcting safety data from patients, and boundaries regarding the limits of their clinical understanding and interpretation of data.

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