You may have come across Patient Opinion already – a site which enables people to share their experience of local health services in public online, and see what others are saying too. The site is run by a small non-for-profit social enterprise in Sheffield. I’m one of the team.
Patient Opinion was the inspiration of Paul Hodgkin, a Sheffield GP, who wanted to see whether the power of the web – which has already up-ended sectors like music, finance, retail and travel – could be used to help public services (and specifically the NHS) get better. We aim to make it quick, easy, and safe for people to share their stories (even embarrasing ones) about local health services, in a way that everyone can see – and we aim to get those stories to the right people in the health care system who can really make a difference. That might be the local managers of a service, a hospital chief executive, or even a national regulator.
In many ways, what we do is inherently hyperlocal. People want to see what others are saying about the nearby services which they rely on. And mostly, we find that the people who want to receive feedback and can really do something with it are frontline staff at local level. That’s because very often patients are asking for small, simple changes which are quick and easy to sort out if you’re on the spot, but slow and laborious if they have to go through organisational processes. Patient Opinion helps this by making possible local public conversations about the quality of care, from the patient’s point of view.
We view stories on the site as small “donations of experience” which we think people give us because they want them used for wider public benefit. So we see the stories on Patient Opinion as a public resource to be used by anyone who wants to help health care, and health professionals, get better. We make all our published content freely available under a Creative Commons licence, and you can pull data from us either as RSS or Atom feeds, or via our fuller API.
Another possibility is to use the Patient Opinion widget, which can display recent postings from a local area, or about a specific hospital, or tagged with a specific tag. Examples of sites using the widget already include Halton Link, Cancer Action Rotherham, Nottinghamshire Healthcare Trust and Wandsworth Link. It takes about 5 minutes to set the widget up, so long as you can edit the html of your page (and if you get stuck, we’ll try to help).
Patient Opinion is one of those things that can only work well as more people use it. We’d love it if you could raise awareness of Patient Opinion (hyper)locally, use our content if you want, and together we can help health services be the best they can be.
