We are redesigning our blood taking (phlebotomy) service after carrying out a review last year to understand what was good about the current service and what could be improved.

The aim is to design a future model which improves the patient experience and enables people equal access to the same high-quality service wherever they live in the county.

As part of the review, we looked at the demand for blood taking and listened to the views and experiences of patients, the public and frontline health care staff.

Learning from this has been used to develop different options for what the future service could look like.

Healthcare staff and people representing the patient voice have looked at these options and scored them against a set of essential criteria which reflect what patients, public and staff told us was important to them including patient choice and access, the skillset of the workforce, reducing health inequalities and value for money.

The options that scored the highest are now being checked to make sure they can be delivered using the resources available before asking people what they think to make sure the new service meets the needs and wishes of our population.

Our public survey

We received an amazing number of responses to our public survey with over 3,500 people providing their feedback. All of the feedback has been analysed and key themes identified which we are using to help inform the future service.