Walk a Day in my Shoes: a WA Health Excellence Award Finalist

At East Metropolitan Health Service (EMHS) we are committed to delivering health care that exemplifies our organisational values of kindness, respect and collaboration.

The Walk a Day in My Shoes (WaDiMS) program is helping us to ensure our patients and consumers are treated with kindness, are welcomed as a partner in their healthcare journey and our staff are appropriately trained to deliver compassionate care.

Read about how this body of work is helping us to ensure we maintain a high standard of communication with our patients, and our colleagues, to ensure we show empathy, compassion, patience and respect to every individual in our community.

Walk a Day in My Shoes (WaDiMS)

EMHS delivers health care to over 700,000 people through an array of hospital, outpatient and community based services with each member of our community having unique story to tell. The WaDiMS program was developed following a review of patient feedback which identified communication between our staff and patients was an ongoing area of improvement.

Good communication between our patients and colleagues is a priority area for EMHS and we all have a responsibility to see and treat everyone as we would wish to be treated; to show empathy, compassion, patience and respect.

After wide consultation with consumer and community groups, advocacy agencies, clinical and support staff that allowed us to hear firsthand what was important to our community the WaDiMS strategy was designed and implemented. This strategy includes:

• The creation of a WaDiMS video as a staff education resource – the video uses real-life patient and staff experiences to demonstrate how empathy, compassion and respect in health care can contribute to better patient outcomes. You can watch the video here.
• Our Executive leadership teams and EMHS Board Members regularly visiting our frontline staff and patients at our hospitals and services to hear firsthand about their experiences and how we can continue to improve our services.
• Frontline staff customer service training is being delivered regularly to help our staff improve their communication with their patients and colleagues.

Since being introduced in 2018 the program has seen an overwhelmingly positive response, demonstrated by our health service seeing a 120% increase in positive Patient Opinion stories and a reduction in complaints.