Virtual services are ways of providing hospital standard care to patients closer to where they live and often in their own home. They are designed to improve the care experience for patients and their families.
Virtual services can be as simple as having your follow up outpatient appointment by video or phone call. Or it may be that we can use technology to monitor people at home rather than admit them to hospital for an overnight stay.
We can also use the same monitoring to allow people to go home from hospital sooner.
We have been using virtual services for a long time in our hospitals but during the COVID-19 pandemic we started to use them much more because people couldn’t come in to see us.
They worked really well, so we have decided to develop them and use them more widely.
It is vital that these services work well for our patients and their families, giving them an improved care experience. So we’d like you to be involved in designing these services so that we can ensure that they meet your needs.
We have been working with Healthwatch Bradford to develop a short survey to get your views. You can access this survey by following this link www.healthwatchbradford.co.uk/vri. Or, if you come into the Trust you will see posters containing a QR code that will take you to the survey. Alternatively patients using the Patient Portal or the Attend Anywhere App will be able to access the survey through the opening pages of these sites.
Inpatients and outpatients attending our hospitals during the week beginning 1 August will also get the opportunity to complete a survey in person by talking to one of our staff. There will also be a stand in our BRI Retail Concourse if you’d like to come and ask us questions and find out more.
We would really appreciate if you could take the time to complete the survey or come to see us. Your views really do matter.