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January 13, 2007

Has any body done anything like Patient Opinion before?

Nope! Dont think so. And we did not hear of anything like us when we led a seminar for the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit last year. But there are quite a lot of American sites that look as though they do the same. For example Revolution Health and RateMD.com both look good and allow you to rate your own personal doctor. But on scratching deeper I could only find positive ratings. Perhaps not surprising given that:
a. both sites are driven by advertising
b. the litiginous nature of US medical practice.

They are surely ambitious though. Revolution Health was founded by Steve Case the ex Chief Executive of AOL who in a related blog is reported as saying he wants the site to be the site where US health consumers can go for everything - comparative outcomes data, health advice about every condition and procedure, and how to compare different health insurance packages. Hard to tell if it will work since the site is still under beta-testing.

We have always thought that the business model underlying our kind of site was really important. There are just so many competing interests (and of course we have our share too) that its all too easy for the needs of the business to drive and distort the site content. After a lot of thought we came to the conlcusion that if there was a sweet spot that managed these conflicts to everyone's advantage and that promoted transparency, it was as a social enterprise driven by subscriptions from organisations about whom the comments are made.
At first glance this looks just as conflicted as any other model. But by giving RSS feeds to other organisations (local commissioners, Scrutiny Committees, national patient groups etc) the voice of the patient on the site is leveraged into something that providers just can't ignore. If there are comments about an opinion from your local commissioners, a patient group and the MP, then suddenly subscribing begins to make sense.

Posted by Paul at 4:02 PM | Comments (0)

January 2, 2007

All mixed up about mixed sex wards

News from the Cutting Edge
"When I was having breast surgery I had 2 nights in a general surgical ward which had male and female patients. I didn't like it especially when the health care assistant left the door open when I was on the comode and a male patient walked past. I can see no benefits of mixed sex wards for the patient."
Unsurprisingly women don’t have a good word to say about mixed sex wards – which contrasts with men who rarely comment to us about this. And as the publicity about mixed sex wards intensifies there is the distinct sound of pigeons coming home to roost. Not only is the NHS having to deal with the fact that almost no one likes mixed wards, it is also having to correct a longstanding fudge about what ‘single sex wards’ actually mean.
Of course for patients a singe sex ward is just that – a ward where you won’t meet a patient of the opposite sex. But for managers single sex wards have usually meant single sex bays which allowed the stock of beds to be used at higher capacity.
When waiting lists were long, and MRSA rates low, the occasional embarrassment of singe sex bays was acceptable if it meant faster treatment (even though the trade off was rarely made explicit).
But now we know that MRSA rates rise sharply as bed occupancy exceed 85% and, as waiting lists fall, such slight of hand is increasingly unacceptable.
And sometimes the down right appalling happens as when Janet Street-Porter’s dying sister woke up to find a naked man masturbating beside her bed.

Things don’t have to get this bad for us to do something. Patient Opinion is currently emailing people who have posted opinions following an In Patients admission to find out what their experience of mixed sex wards and mixed sex bays was like. When the results are in we will post them up on the site and here on the blog. But in the mean time if you have any experiences about mixed sex wards you want to share then post them up as stories or email us.

Posted by Paul at 4:35 PM | Comments (0)