A project called myPolice won Glasgow’s Social Innovation Camp last weekend (congratulations), and was soon being described as like “Patient Opinion for the police”. Becoming a cultural reference point for siCamp felt good!

But it wasn’t long before the good old British press brought everyone down to earth, with a fairly misleading piece in the Sunday Times titled “Warning over ‘shop a cop’ website”. You get the picture.

To their credit, the team behind myPolice have busily been blogging their own point of view, and others have stepped in with incisive commentary.

There’s always a certain fascination in watching how “old media” react to new media innovation. They seem to zig-zag between wide-eyed wonder and snide dismissal, depending on the time of day.

In this instance, the piece was predictable, if a little depressing. But coming from a health research background, what struck me was how negative the press can be about not-for-profit social innovation, while endlessly carrying uncritical and hyped-up reports of “medical breakthroughs” and new “wonder drugs”, with little solid evidence and clearly commercial motivations. Pharma innovation good, social innovation bad?

Somehow, the Sunday Times even managed to misrepresent us too, describing Patient Opinion as a site “which encourages online criticism of the NHS”. I mean, how hard is it to turn up at the site and see for yourself?

Nobody would deny that we've seen enormous improvements in healthcare in the last 25 years - and not just in medical and surgical interventions, but in the organisation of care. Look at those falling waiting times!

But once in a while (or maybe a bit more often than that) we get a posting on Patient Opinion that makes us blink and rub our eyes in astonishment. Like this one, which arrived last week:

Last week I had to wait for 2 hours to see my GP, 45 minutes of which I was standing in a queue. There was a heavily pregnant woman in front of me who was obviously finding standing for so long hard, so I had to tell her I'd queue for her and let her back in at the last minute.

Sorry? Did you say standing in a queue?

That can't be right. Maybe the relevant GP surgery could get in touch and tell us why we've misunderstood.

When a word moves from the realm of the geekerati into the mainstream media, it's often a sign that some kind of cultural shift is afoot.

And so it is this week, as Victor Keegan writes an interesting piece in Technology Guardian on "hyperlocal". And, satisfyingly, Patient Opinion gets a mention.

To be fair, although we do offer some kind of hyperlocal potential, I don't think we have yet delivered it sufficiently. Perhaps our new API and RSS feeds will help a bit (see blog post not quite yet written), although we'll need to find some lat/long data to make them properly useful.

But Keegan's piece prompted a different thought: so far, the emphasis of hyperlocal seems to be almost entirely on providing information, rather than supporting civic involvement or community action. Again not yet delivered, but very definitely on the Patient Opinion"to do" list, is something a bit more along these lines.

As always in times of crisis and upheaval, we must recall Marx: "Bloggers have only complained about the world, in various ways. The point is to change it."

I think this applies to hyperlocal too.

We're recruiting - again.

Recently we promoted Kate - the lynchpin of posting moderation - to head up our new pilot project on web feedback in social care (residential homes, to be precise). So now we have to replace her.

We're looking for someone enthusiastic, sociable, and not too scared of the web.

Here's the job description. Get in touch if you're interested.

Just a quick note to say that the intrepid Alex Stobart is holding the second ScotWeb2 event in Edinburgh on 19 June.

The last (and first) one, back in October, was a lively and informative affair with a great bunch of people. I feel we should be calling this one ScotWeb2:2.

Anyway, I'll be there talking about Patient Opinion's new programme of work with all the mental health trusts in England, which I'm extremely excited about. I do think the web offers extraordinary new opportunities to users of mental health services, and I'm hoping we can make a worthwhile contribution to the whole area.

And who knows - maybe we can work out some way of providing a similar service in Scotland? We just need to find some people who could help make it happen.

We've just published a posting from someone who spent a few days on a hospital surgical ward.

It includes the following eye-witness account:

"When this very frail old woman as asked if he could pass the tea to her that he had just poured into a beaker for her, he said, 'Sorry love I am not trained for that', and just left her."

Hard to believe. Could this be the most depressing bit of feedback we've ever had?

One service user describes why she likes Patient Opinion.

It's been my lifelong ambition to get a letter in the Guardian. (I know, I know. But it has.)

And finally, after 35 years of trying, I did get one published, on the first day of 2009, about the plan (announced again yesterday) to allow patients to "rate" their GP practice on the web.

And today I did it again - well, not quite, since it is in Society Guardian, but close. This time, about feedback from users of mental health services.

Oh, one more thing.. er, there was story about Patient Opinion in the Financial Times today too.

Not a bad day.

The first three years of Patient Opinion have been about trying to get a worthwhile, legal, ethical and scalable feedback service sorted out for hospital and community services.

Now that we've got that working pretty well - and right across the UK - we're ready for the next challenge. As it happens, over the coming year we expect to be doing two interesting new things, and so we're looking for two interesting new people to help us.

First, we expect to be rolling out our mental health feedback service for all mental health trusts in England. Our aim is to engage with mental health services right across England, based on our experience piloting the service in 5 Boroughs Partnership NHS Trust. We're already getting plenty of feedback from mental health service users, but can it help change services?

Second, we're also hoping to test out the Patient Opinion model of feedback in nursing and residential care homes for older people. Social care needs user involvement and feedback just as much as health care does, though there's no doubt that some of the practical challenges of web-based feedback are greater. But we're going to give it a try!

We're looking for someone to join our core admin team to support the mental health programme, and someone to run the social care project, under the guidance of our CEO Paul Hodgkin.

If you'd like to know more about either post, you'll find further details on our jobs page.

I'm mightily relieved to be able to announce that a couple of days ago we finally managed to load up the Scottish acute and mental health services onto Patient Opinion.

So now when patients, service users and carers in Scotland post their comments, we'll be able to gather them up and feed them back properly.

Hmmm... I think it's true to say that Patient Opinion is now the only patient feedback site to enable feedback about services right across the UK. Hurrah!