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September 28, 2005

Demos Greenhouse: Risking it

Interesting piece from Demos about choosing hospitals: Demos Greenhouse: Risking it:

"researchers ... found that the best hospitals actually tended to report more mistakes, which of course allowed them to learn from those mistakes and steadily improve"

Is this true? Certainly more honesty sounds better than covering up mistakes, but do people always make 'logical' decisions about their care?

Posted by Lee at 10:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 19, 2005

Try saying sorry, NHS doctors told

Try saying sorry, NHS doctors told, reports the Observer this weekend. Interesting stuff, but what about patients saying thank you where appropriate as well. That is something that Patient Opinion is trying to encourage as well as moans and complaints.

Can both approaches co-exist, and can they help foster a more personal, human relationship between doctors and patients in the NHS?

Posted by Lee at 11:33 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 9, 2005

We are rolling launch mode

The official launch date is tomorrow, but we have exposed the live site already to demo users, and we will move this to the domain root at 3pm today.

I just spoke at the Our Social World conference in Cambridge and took the opportunity to announce the site to a group of social software practitioners. There were lots of questions and the site has aroused some interest. If you are coming here from there, then welcome - all feedback welcome in these early days!

Posted by Lee at 12:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 7, 2005

We have finally done it!

Have just today edited the very first opinions posted on the Patient Opinion website by members of the public. After 3 years work the website, the funding, the people, the ideas all got lined up in one place.... and then someone, an unknown member of the public in South Yorkshire, logged on and gave something back to the NHS!
It gave me a great feeling - and really confirmed that we are right on the brink of creating something fantastically valuable with huge potential for helping the NHS change and improve.

At the same time I've been worrying for the last few days about whether the website was going to be ready and whether all the bugs and wrinkles would get sorted. As ever the team at Headshift came through with flying colours and although there are still some rough edges to sort out, the site is just massively impressive.
As so often in this last six months I thank our good fortune in meeting up with Headshift and not going with some of the early developers that we worked with.

Posted by Paul at 6:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 6, 2005

Pre-release development update

The beta version of Patient Opinion is almost ready for its pilot launch in South Yorkshire. It is humbling to think how much passion exists among NHS patients and their families for the sharing of stories to improve services, and just how much we have to learn about this process when we open our doors.

The PO team is Sheffield have done so well to bring this project to fruition. I hope the online system we have built will do them justice.

Launch day is close, but the team are managing to crank out some useful features that we hope will make sense to people...

Posted by Lee at 10:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack