« February 2006 | Main | July 2006 »

June 20, 2006

Patient Opinion is a New Media Awards 2006 finalist

We’ve just heard that Patient Opinion is a finalist in the New Statesman’s New Media Awards 2006. We’re up against four other sites (including the Guardian’s new blog) under the “contribution to civic society” heading. So we are really excited!

Of course, if we are honest we have to admit that we haven’t actually made very much of a contribution to civic society yet. It’s more of a potential contribution.

But the potential is absolutely huge!

Just think. The population of England clocks up about 11 million inpatient stays and 44 million outpatient attendances in NHS hospitals each year.

Even if patients posted their opinions and ratings on the Patient Opinion web site in just a tenth of one percent of these encounters, that would be 55,000 individual items of feedback to help improve local services and inform patient choices.

And that really would be a contribution to civic society.

Posted by James at 9:04 PM | Comments (0)

June 2, 2006

Version 2 goes live

We've just released Version 2.0 of Patient Opinion. For patients this means that we can handle comments about mental health better than before and the site is easier to search.

For trusts Version 2.0 brings much bigger improvements - it is much easier to set up RSS feeds that direct postings of interest to the right manager or doctor. And it is also much easier for trusts to respond to postings.

Quite a few hospitals are already responding but so far this is mainly to critical postings - I hope that soon hospitals will start responding to some of the many positive postings "It's great to hear that you had a positive experience in our A&E Department last week. This will mean a lot to the staff as it happens that there were two members of staff of sick that week too. Thank you!"

One of the things that we did not expect when we set up Patient Opinion was how much it would evolve public conversations about detailed aspects of a trust's services. In some ways these conversations are a new form of micro-democracy - users and providers can have useful, short, public discussions that explain the detail and complexity that often lies behind any improvement in the service.

Posted by Paul at 4:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack