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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 September 12, 2006 7:47 AM