MORE than twenty members of the public made comments on the care they had received at hospitals in the area as part of an intensive assessment of the Morecambe Bay Hospitals Trust.

The Commission for Health Improvement - set up in 1999 to help monitor and improve the quality of service provided by the NHS - is in the middle of a 24-week review of the trust as part of its programme of assessing every NHS organisation in England and Wales.

Feedback from patients is a crucial part of this process, and last week Andrew Paterson, CHI's review manager for the Morecambe Bay assessment, met with people who had been treated at the five hospitals covered by the trust.

"We met a wide range of people with a wide range of experiences in all three centres.

It's certainly given us lots of food for thought," said Mr Paterson.

"The anecdotes and stories that people give us are an important illustration of things that go right and things that could have gone better."

The aim of the assessment is not to look at individual complaints or departments but the overall systems in place to ensure a high quality of patient care is delivered.

Mr Paterson said that the interviews last week, and the results of 200 patient diaries, were two crucial sources of information which would help highlight what kind of issues the review team needed to look at when they spend a week in the trust interviewing staff in September.

At the end of the review, the CHI will make recommendations to the trust which it will address in an action plan.

* There is still time for people to make comments on the quality of care they have received by calling 0845-601-3012, emailing andrew.paterson@chi.nhs.uk or writing to Andrew Paterson, Morecambe Bay Hospitals NHS Trust, Commission for Health Improvement, 103-105 Bunhill Row, London, EC1Y 8TG