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September 15, 2006

Should Patient Opinion do 'policy'?

This week we got a posting complaining that stroke care at Preston did not conform to recommended national policy.
We don't comment or direct people to resources about clinical matters. But should we do so for policy? This posting for example clearly relates to the National Audit Office review of Stroke Care issued in November 2005. Would it help to include a link to this and so inform the debate on the site? Or is this over stepping what Patient Opinion should do? Might it make us appear a campaigning organisation and just bring out a lot of comment

Posted by Paul at 3:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 12, 2006

Questionnaires don't answer the question

Picker Europe (the people who run much of the National Patient Survey for NHS hospitals each year) have just published a report showing that using questionnaires to find out what patients think isn't very effective: Hospitals don't ask about the right things and even when they do the questions are often unclear.
Surveys like this are clearly 'a good thing' since of course we all want to know what patients really think of services. And how better to do it than ask a representative sample clear and concise questions?
Nothing wrong with this except it accords with how rational policy makers [like to think they!] make decisions, rather than with how ordinary people on the sharp end of a medical intervention often think.
Reputational approaches (like those that we're developing on Patient Opinion) take a complementary approach: let's start with people's stories (which of course are intrinsically more interesting than survey results) and share them. This of itself helps patients get an immediate sense of what a unit or hospital is like.
By gathering many opinions and collating them together we can turn these interesting if unreliable comments in to a more consistent, ever topical set of stories and scores. These reputations, held as they on the web, turn quite naturally into quality drivers as hospitals and units reply and respond to very specific problems and suggestions.

Posted by Paul at 7:47 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 5, 2006

Generating site postings the organic way

Its always interesting to hear what other people think of what you're doing - here is the thoughtful take of the people at the MAC Consultancy on what we do at Patient Opinion

They are absolutely right when they say that we will will live or die by the number of postings that we get. So increasingly we are working directly with general practices to generate postings. By recruiting a few practices in each area we can generate 25 -30 postings per week from patients who have just had care at hospital.
This in turn means that our postings are much more focused - 1,000 postings per year about 1 hospital is much more use to everybody (patients, GPs and hospitals) than 3 postings about each of the 300 hospitals in England. Less glamorous than an article in the Mirror but just as effective.

Posted by Paul at 2:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack