11. The patient experience is
the most powerful lever
here - and will be used for
service improvement
Lord Darzi, June 2008
12. We will also encourage more
widespread use of patient experience
surveys and real-time feedback. We
will enable patients to rate services
and clinical departments according to
the quality of care they received
Equity and Excellence, 2010
13. Feedback from patients, carers and
families, and staff will help to inform…
the right choice of hospital or clinical
department and will encourage
providers to be more responsive
Equity and Excellence, 2010
14. Patient Opinion aims to
make it easy for patients
and carers to give feedback
And easy for busy health service
staff to listen and respond
This is a brief presentation to give an overview of what Patient Opinion is for and what it does
People have been sharing their experiences of health care on the web since the web began – and they will continue to do so, with us or without us, as long as the web exists
Patients, carers and service users – and even staff – will blog, tweet and share experience on Facebook. They will upload photos and videos – and perhaps even more things, as time goes on.
This is a photos on flickr – the largest photo sharing site on the web
And another
And another
One patient uploaded pictures of his food onto his blog and asked people to guess what they were.
The story hit the press.
In the end the Dept of Health had to make a comment about the quality of hospital food – all because of one bored patient and his blog
People also post photos about clinical issues
Age is no barrier.
This tweet is from the late Ivy Bean – who was aged 104 when she tweeted this.
And this shows how people are prepared to share much more than perhaps we would have done even just 10 years ago.
Recent health policy is placing new emphasis on the patient experience
– and also recognises that, more and more, people are going online both to share experiences and to find information
This is from the Darzi report in 2008
Note the emphasis on not just measuring experience – but using it to improve care.
That is not easy to do – but improving care is what people want when they share their experience.
This is from the 2010 white paper on the NHS.
Again, an emphasis on feedback, rating and quality.
The white paper envisages using feedback to help others choose.
Very often, we see patients wanting their feedback to be used to make services better. That is what we aim for with Patient Opinion.
The point of Patient Opinion is to give people a way to share their experience online which is:
Safe
Easy
Constructive
Can make a difference
And to make it easy for the NHS too, to show
It is listening
It is improving
It values feedback
Here is the current PO homepage
This will change in early 2011 as we release a new version
Note the key messages – share your story, read others, see how the NHS is listening and changing
The latest opinions tab here shows recent opinions being published
Here is the latest responses tab
And here are the postings which have led to recent changes – we’ll see more about this later.
You can easily find services near you – type your postcode in, and perhaps a condition or procedure, and the site will find relevant services
Heres the page for the Royal Hallamshire in Sheffield.
Recent stories at the top, then ratings from patients.
You can drill down to specialties or departments.
People really appreciate the chance to feed back so easily.
And about 50% of feedback is positive – not critical at all.
Plenty of postings are positive – often patients just want their thanks passed on to busy staff.
This posting is remarkable for a number of reasons.
First, it provides information which is simply unavailable from anyone other than the patient.
Second, it shows how the web is both globally public, yet astonishingly intimate too.
Third, it illustrates how people may offer feedback online which they might well avoid doing in person.
Fourth, it suggests that standard surveys of “patient satisfaction” and the like may easily miss the specific, subtle, actionable feedback which is needed to make care better.
And fifth, it reminds us that so many of the changes that would make a real, tangible difference to patients’ experience are simple, inexpensive and straightforward to implement – yet will never become important enough to appear on the radar of senior management
When something isn’t right, patients want an empathic, simple, honest response.
They don’t necessarily want to get drawn into the organisation, or given jobs to do like contacting PALS.
They just want to know their concern is noted, and will be thought about.
Sometimes, though, it is nice to show that services are not just listening, but acting too!
Doing this will help overcome the common public perception that “giving feedback is pointless”
We want Patient Opinion to be accessible widely and usable by many many people.
We offer feedback by phone and post as well as online.
These days it is easy to flow information from one web site to others.
You can easily bring feedback from Patient Opinion onto your own site with our widget.
Here’s an example.
It takes about 5 minutes to set this up.
The widget can be filtered in lots of ways
By service
- by population
- by condition or procedure etc
Here’s an example of filtering just for cancer in Yorkshire.
This one is filtered to show postings for a population area.
Not everyone is online – recently we launched a new service with Looking Local
This allows you to see Patient Opinion on digital TV
This is what the service looks like in the Sefton area
You can see all 25,000 postings that we have on the web site
- But you can’t add a story through the TV yet,. We’re working on that.
This is what a story would look like on the telly.
