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)

December 5, 2005

eGovernment Conference 2005: honourable mention

Many thanks to William Heath for his mention of Patient Opinion in his speech at the recent Ministerial eGovernment Conference 2005.

Speaking about co-creation and how traditional European democratic feedback mechanism are being enhanced by digital media in general - and Web 2.0 techniques in particular - William outlined his vision of an e-Europe which

...needs to evolve on the basis of feedback about what people want and what works.

But he also asks, with good reason:

Are Europe's public-sector institutions open to such feedback? When they hear it, can they - do they even want to - act on it?

In this context, William had this to say about Patient Opinion:

Paul Hodgkin, a GP from Yorkshire, Launched Patient Opinion this month. It collects stories about the National Health Service and gives health managers unvarnished feedback. With RSS the individual responsible gets precisely the relevant feedback for their specific unit.

Health Managers were pretty apprehensive about this - wouldn't you be? - but so far half the replies have used this service to say "thank you".

A quarter do raise problems, but generally in a dispassionate and responsible way. Of course Health Trusts want any criticisms removed, but Patient Opinion, which is supported by the DoH, is brokering process to manage even complaints about a named member of staff.

We have been thinking a lot recently about how NHS organisations can respond and adapt to increasing levels of online engagement by ordinary people, and how they can benefit from the many opportunities afforded by this - all of which is actually informing our plans for further system development and the services we can offer to our subscribers.

Posted by Livio at 10:19 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack