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July 26, 2006

Patient Opinion is highly commended in New Statesman awards

Well, we didn't win at the New Statesman New Media Awards on Monday but we did get Highly Commended. Which feels a bit like Crufts but is great!
The winnner of in our category (Contibution to Civic Society) was MySociety's Write to Them - so congratulations to them. And great to see the whole range of finalists (32 across 8 different categories).

We spent our evening chatting with good friends Livio and Neil from Headshift and wondering about all the networking we could be doing with the great and the good of London's media all around us. And drinking the champagne of course. Thanks to everyone at New Statesman and Atos Origin - we'll be back next year!

Posted by Paul at 12:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 4, 2006

Patient Opinion debuts at the PMDU

Today we presented our experience to date in developing Patient Opinion to the good folk of the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit, along with some from DirectGov too.

And as you might expect, we got asked some very thoughtful questions. For example: This looks good - but which patients does it exclude? And which providers? Does it really change how people make choices? And does it really change services? And could it change policy too? If so, how?

Whew! Good questions. And rather difficult to answer - early days, and all that. But we feel the signs that PO could change services, and help patients, and perhaps even affect policy, are there. We feel optimistic - so long as we can achieve a much larger scale of use than we have to date - that PO will have a tangible, and even measurable, impact on health services and patients. We'll certainly be looking for evidence of that impact as we develop the service further.

Posted by James at 8:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 3, 2006

We're off to see the wizards

Tomorrow we are off to London talk to the high-flying civil servants of the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit.

Our brief is to say something about what we have learned (so far) from Patient Opinion about generating citizen feedback on public services via the web.

Naturally, we're excited. And maybe a little nervous too. After all, we feel like we have learned a lot in the past year or so - but we know there is a lot still to learn about how to do this. And, although we've thought a great deal about getting feedback on health services, we have thought a lot less about how this might translate to other public services.

For example, could or should there be a PupilOpinion, a PassengerOpinion, or even an InmateOpinion? We don't know. But it will be interesting to see what the great minds at PMDU make of Patient Opinion, so far.

You can get an idea what we've learned from our PowerPoint presentation, here.

And we'll tell you how it went, tomorrow.

Posted by James at 3:54 PM | Comments (0)