Medequip is the biggest provider of community equipment services in the UK. It has contracts with local councils and health services in over 30 areas, with 26 depots serving a population of 20,215,217 people. To deliver on these contracts it sources, buys, loans, collects and recycles simple pieces of equipment for people to use at home. Equipment is prescribed by local government clinicians like Occupational Therapists and providers like Medequip fulfil those prescriptions.
People who used community equipment services are clear that ‘the system’ isn’t always great. Providers like Medequip say that their power to change, or even influence, this system is limited.
Medequip wondered if coproduction might help them to improve their services and took the brave and groundbreaking step of establishing the Equipment Matters group. The group, a partnership of people who use equipment and Medequip, meet regularly, discussing issues, making challenges, proposing solutions and acting together.
Early meetings established that the group as 2 main aims:
- To work with Medequip and challenge it to better
- To influence the wider sector and system
Jacqui
I joined the group as a new member a little less than a year ago. I use community equipment and care for my son who uses it too. Equipment is really important to me, it helps me to do things independently, without help from others, it keeps me active and enables me to live my life the way I want to. It gives me choice and control and I really value that.
When I joined the group, I was unsure about Medequip and uncertain whether their commitment to coproduction was genuine. I need not have worried! The group made me so welcome, and I could see lots of opportunities to contribute my expertise and experience to the world of community equipment.
At an early meeting I learned that Medequip did not yet have a way to feedback to the Equipment Matters group. They seemed to be taking lots of actions and making changes, but they weren’t yet reporting back on this.
So, the group decided to try and do something about this – setting up a Task and Finish Group, which I joined. The group met a couple of times and talked about what they needed from Medequip when it came to reporting back. We came up with a simple ‘you said we did’ form and tasked Medequip with using it to report back to Equipment Matters in 2025.
Learning from equipment users
One of the big changes Medequip have made over the last year or so is to improve their approach to gaining feedback from their customers. Medequip is required by all its commissioners to gather customer feedback and to turn this into customer satisfaction type data and stats. To meet this requirement Medequip used to have a simple questionnaire asking equipment users questions about things like whether the delivery van had arrived on time and whether the driver was smart and polite. None of these questions asked people whether the equipment was right for them, whether it made any difference to their lives and independence and whether the service was effective from their perspective.
So, a decision was made to try and change this, with Equipment Matters members asked to come up with different questions, the right questions for people rather than for the system. After lots of hard work, based firmly on coproduction principles, a new set of questions emerged. Medequip began to use the questions, developing a new online survey, challenging narrow commissioner thinking and integrating this more outcomes driven approach into their organisations systems and culture.
Reporting back
Together Equipment Matters and Medequip leads decided to use this great work on the new customer feedback system to test the new reporting approach.
Michaela Harris, Medequip General Manager, came to our Equipment Matters meeting in May with the new ‘your said we did’ form in hand. She shared an excellent slide set the highlights of which were that Medequip used to have 5 feedback questions that were posed to their customers. These were:
- Please rate the pre-delivery arrangements
- Please rate the collection arrangements (if applicable)
- Please rate the condition of the equipment on delivery
- How likely is it that you would recommend this service to friends and family?
She shared that Medequip wanted to improve this and said: ‘We had 5 very basic questions which really told us nothing about the service – nor how we could improve it’
The presentation worked through the new questions Medequip is now asking its customers, questions that have much more focus on the person’s experience and the impact of that on their life and independence.
Micheala shared that the new system has been rolled out to many areas where Medequip operates and that over 3000 people have used it to share feedback. Then she talked about how Medequip was using all this new information, to capture and act on complaints and compliments and learn lessons. Michaela shared how the results were being reported to the Medequip board too. We realised the new approach already has massive and growing reach.
From this really practical approach I could really see the real impact of Equipment Matters on the huge commercial organisation that is Medequip. In the moment I also realised with amusement that a coproduced approach to customer feedback was being used to test a coproduced approach to reporting back. How cool is that!
It will be interesting to see what happens next. I know that I and my fellow Equipment Matters group members will need to make sure that Medequip are firmly tasked with reporting like this at every future meeting. That said I am optimistic that coproduction has real potential to influence the complex and tricky community equipment sector. So, watch this space!
Jacqui Darlington – Equipment Matters group member and community equipment user