Boosting access to Auburn Hospital Antenatal Services through understanding and responding to patient experience

Auburn Hospital Antenatal Services (AHAS) is well on the road to deliver the best care to their diverse community of expectant mothers. Through the utilisation of its online, real-time My Experience Matters Survey - which uses the platform provided by Civica, the leading cloud software for measuring patient feedback - AHAS now has an ongoing project that will create a best practice antenatal patient experience.

Auburn Hospital, part of the Western Sydney Local Health District (WSLHD), serves one of the fastest growing and most culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) local government areas in New South Wales, with 60 per cent of their residents born overseas.

The challenge: WSLHD is committed to ensuring all the hospitals within its network meet or exceed required service level agreements set by the NSW Ministry of Health while also aligning with patient experience expectations. Under a framework that benchmarks all services, AHAS was flagged within its Emergency Risk Management System (ERMS). This risk was based on the low percentage of pregnant women accessing antenatal care at the recommended 12 to 14-week gestation period within their catchment area. To start investigating why access to antenatal services had dropped so drastically, WSLHD’s Innovation and Redesign project lead, Julianne Harvey & co-lead Auburn Hospital Clinical Midwifery Consultant, Helen Mou were given the role to uncover the systemic issues creating this low uptake.

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