TfGM Citizens‘ Engagement Survey in Manchester
Inclusive mobility is essential to guarantee social participation, as well as boosting public transport ridership. Thus, several citizens’ engagement activities were held by Transport for Greater Manchester in the framework of the REFORM project.
Three engagement workshops took place in March and April, followed by an additional in-person workshop held at the Manchester Deaf Centre. The latter highlighted several major challenges:
1. Gain insight into barriers that prevent people from travelling to hospitals and healthcare sites via public transport and active modes
2. Guide TfGM’s Customer Journeys team’s improvements to provision of customer travel information
3. Provide direction to TfGM and its partners in healthcare and government to realise NHS and Government goals of:
• Reducing carbon emissions from staff and patient travel
• Shifting staff and patient journeys to PT and active modes
• Ensure that care at home and in the local community meets patient needs, to reduce lengthy trips to hospitals
Other workshop results focused on the transport offers from and to hospitals, which highlighted that real-time information and readability of timetables need to be improved. An additional challenge is the communication with the staff at stations and interchanges. On-demand transportation can also further help to get older citizens and physically and mentally impaired citizens to the hospitals.
As communicated in previous news items, the Wigan Infirmary was the test bed for many planned implementations and exchanges between TfGM, hospital staff and patients. The changes in the display of PT information in the hospital, as well as the improvements for online information on the hospital website are great pilot results that have the potential to be implemented in the other 16 hospitals of Greater Manchester. Thus, two major policy improvements were defined:
1) Sustainable Travel Information for Hospitals in Greater Manchester
• Based on prototype activities undertaken at Wigan Infirmary and subsequent Capacity Building Event
• Bus real-time departure information to be implemented at all hospitals in the region, facilitating patient and staff travel to these sites
• Sustainable travel information (PT and active modes) to be included on patient letters from all hospitals, with trackable links to corresponding dedicated TfGM webpages
2) Actioning key findings from Citizen Engagement Sessions
• Improve Customer Travel Information to address patient and staff barriers to public transport and active travel use when travelling to healthcare sites
• Ensure that findings are reflected and properly addressed in plans for service improvements as part of planned Bus Franchising across Greater Manchester over the next few years
