Oxford Medical Genetics Laboratories, The Churchill, Old Road, Headington, Oxford, OX3 7LJ
Head of Laboratory: Dr Anneke Seller
 01865 225594
www.ouh.nhs.uk/geneticslab
Oxford Medical Genetics Laboratories
User Satisfaction Survey - “Communication” 2015
Dear User,
Many thanks for participating in our 2015 Survey about Communication. We really appreciate the
time you have taken to provide us with feedback and were pleased that ~25% of invited users
completed the survey.
Below is a summary of the questions posed with a further section of user comments and laboratory
actions.
Q1. Please indicate the type of referral you send to
our laboratory (tick all that apply)
We asked the users to identify which service areas they use.
•
•
The majority of respondents submit referrals for 2
or more services.
The most frequent referral category was
Developmental Delay, closely followed by Muscular
Disorders, Cardiomyopathy & Arrhythmia and
Cancer & Endocrine.
Q2. How often do you contact the laboratory?
We asked the users to score how frequently they
use each contact method: Often, Sometimes, Rarely
and Never.
•
•
The majority of respondents contact
the laboratory by telephone and email.
For email contact, the most frequent
method was direct email to a specific
team or individual staff member,
followed closely by email to the
oxford.dnalab@nhs.net address.
Referral Type
Cancer & Endocrine
% Response
28.0%
Cardiomyopathy & Arrhythmia
29.3%
Craniosynostosis & Skeletal
dysplasia
Cystic Fibrosis
18.3%
Developmental delay
Mitochondrial
34.1%
22.0%
Muscular disorders
Neurogenetic
30.5%
25.6%
Retinal & Ataxia
8.5%
Postnatal karyotype
Prenatal testing
22.0%
14.6%
Leukaemia / Tumour
8.5%
Total Users
82
17.1%
Q3. When you contact the laboratory ...
We asked the users to provide feedback on the availability of relevant staff, whether the information provided was
adequate and our speed of response.
•
•
•
91% of respondents stated that they are
able to reach an appropriate member of
staff always or most of the time.
96% stated that they were provided
with the information or advice required
always or most of the time.
96% of respondents stated that we
were able to deal with their enquiry
promptly always or most of the time.
Q4. Please rate the quality of information you receive on a scale of 1 to 5
(1 = poor, 5 = excellent).
In this question we asked the users to rate the quality of information they received from each of the three main
staffing groups.
•
•
•
•
Overall the majority of respondents
Q4.
rated the quality of information
1
2
3
4
5
N/A
Answer Options
from all three staffing groups as 4
Office staff
2
0
4
22
36
13
Genetic
and 5 (Very Good to Excellent).
2
0
2
13
43
17
Technologists
The quality of information from
Clinical Scientists
2
0
2
13
61
1
Clinical Scientists was rated highest among the three staffing groups.
This reflects the fact that the majority of users contact the Clinical Scientists for advice.
The genetic technologist group has significantly less contact with the users; 22.08% of
respondents marked N/A against this group.
Q5. Have you used our laboratory website?
• The majority of respondents (>74%) have not used our laboratory web site or did not
know it existed.
The laboratory web site includes
information on our:
test repertoire, prices, facts about each
disease / technical area, guides on how
to send a sample, including sample
referral cards and pre-referral forms.
The web address is located in the header
of all molecular genetics reports and in
the footer of email signatures
(http://www.ouh.nhs.uk/geneticslab) or
Google us using ‘Genetics lab Oxford’.
Total
Response
Count
77
77
79
Q6. If you have used the website did you find what you were looking for?
We asked the users to categorise the availability of different types of information into 4 groups: “I found this
information”, “I didn’t find this information”, “I didn’t look for this information” and “N/A”.
•
•
•
Most respondents who use our
website could locate the information
detailed in the 6 categories.
Contact Information and Specific
Disease/Test Information were the
most commonly found.
15% of respondents, who use the
website, said that they could not find
our test prices
Q7. Please grade different aspects of our clinical reports based on whether they meet your
clinical needs (5 = completely meets your clinical needs, 1 = does not meet your clinical
needs).
We asked the users to rate six main aspects of our reports: turnaround times, presentation and clarity of results,
detail of interpretive comments, scientific content, availability of additional information and overall quality.
•
•
•
Overall the majority of respondents rated all six aspects of our reports as 4 or above.
The highest rated aspects of our clinical reports were scientific content (88%) and overall
quality (87%).
Some respondents felt that two aspects of our reports were not meeting their clinical needs,
namely Turnaround times (ratings 1-3 33.7%) and Availability of additional information
(ratings 1-3 26.3%).
Q8. If you have suggestions on how we could improve our clinical reports, please provide
them below.
• A total of 19 comments were submitted for this question
• 23.7% of these were complimentary towards our reports and service.
• 76.3% of these were constructive/improvement suggestions
Q9. If you have any further comments regarding our service or your experience of
communicating with the laboratory, please provide them below.
• A total of 25 comments were submitted for this question.
• 88% of these were complimentary towards service delivery, specific teams and overall
quality of service provided by the laboratory.
• 12% of these were constructive criticisms or improvement suggestions.
Q10. Contact Details
• Just over 50% (47/83) of the total participants submitted their details
• 27.66% of the 47 responses were internal (from the OUH Trust) and 72.34% were
external.
Overall Survey Participants
16%
Internal (OUH)
43%
External
41%
Anonymous
Summary of Comments and Actions
We received some very complimentary comments about the services, the staff, the clinical reports
(including the level of detail and interpretative comments) and the general availability of additional
information via email contact or by speaking directly to members of staff.
There were some comments about report turnaround times (TATs) and whilst the users generally
feel that the TATs meet their clinical needs (as demonstrated in question 7) some did not feel that
they meet the patient’s expectations. The reports issued from this department are currently meeting
professional guidelines (Association for Clinical Genetic Science) for turnaround times. However, we
constantly strive to improve the efficiency, effectiveness and quality of our tests by introducing new
technology and improving laboratory workflow and processes. Additionally, in order to provide more
information to patients and raise awareness of the complexities and multi-step processes involved in
genetic testing, we have also been involved in a number of ‘patient engagement’ events over the
last year. We will continue to increase our patient engagement over the coming year.
Several constructive comments and suggestions were received regarding our departmental website
and the availability of electronic or emailed reports. These are two areas that we will be targeting for
improvement in the coming year:
• We aim to have an updated set of disease information pages available on our web site by
the end of August 2015. We will also improve links to other areas of the website, in
particular accessibility of the price list.
• We are investigating the technical and workload implications required to make our Clinical
reports available in an electronic format. In the past this has not been possible due to
technical constraints; mainly the configuration of our Laboratory Information Management
System (LIMS) for encryption requirements. We anticipate that it may take several years
before all of our reports are available electronically to all service users but we hope to make
significant progress in this area over the coming year.
A small number of comments were received about the availability of more interpretative
information or general / basic level information about the tests, genes and results. Along with our
colleagues in Clinical Genetics we are due to implement a new “Genetics Grand Round”, which will
enable local Clinicians to join us each month for presentations of interesting cases. These sessions
will focus on a specific disease area or technique each month. We are keen to invite external
speakers/attendees to these sessions, so please let us know if you have any interesting cases to
share with us or if you would like to be added to our mailing list to be informed about future
sessions (oxford.dnalab@nhs.net). More information on the Genetics Grand Round will be available
on our departmental website over the next few months.
We hope you find this a useful summary and please do not hesitate to contact us with any further
suggestions or comments you may have on the services we provide.
Yours sincerely
Karen McGuire
Quality Manager for Genetics