I have just personally reviewed every opinion posted about NHS Highland on the Patient Opinion website. And when I say personally, I mean personally!  Patient Opinion is one new approach we are taking to encourage patients to feed back.  It forms part of our overall approach to capturing patient experience.  At a time when resouces are tighter than ever some may be tempted to reduce the time they spend on the so called "softer" elements of patient care.  But in my view it's more important than ever that we listen to our patients.

I am delighted that staff are taking it so seriously.  In response to one of our recent stories a Head of Service commented, "Thanks for sharing this with me too.  It's always good to get feedback and it helps us to make improvements that make a difference to patients.  it was great to see lots of staff being appreciated not just the Consultant!"

A patient who raised an issue on Patient Opinion about prescriptions alerted us to a problem that we have now fixed.  And having carried out a wider review we have been able to bring about improvements across Highland.

Ultimately we want to get to a position where giving and receiving feedback is as natural as saying please and thank you.  

Online tools like Patient Opinion will help us to listen, respond and improve.  I commend it to you.

Elaine Mead, Chief Executive, NHS Highland

If you had to choose being able to see the name of the person who sent you an email or its title which would you choose? Well the evidence is pretty clear that most of us go for the person not the title. The messenger has always been more important than the message when it comes to getting stuff into our consciousness.

This is important when it comes to writing a good response on Patient Opinion (or any other social media platform). The more personal the responder is, the more feel they feel OK about being visible as the messenger, the easier it will for the reader to hear them. So here is a great response from Epsom and St Helier

We're glad your husband's injury wasn't serious and we'll pass your kind comments on to the team, including - importantly - the 'niggle' about having to give the full medical history twice. As you'd expect, there are procedures in place for staff to check and double-check some elements of a patient's medical history, but you shouldn't need to repeat the full history in such a short space of time.

It’s good because the writer has obviously read and appreciated the original story. And it’s written in a friendly style that makes you think there is someone pretty human at the back of it.

But it could be even better. For a start the author is simply ‘Epsom and St Helier University Hospitals’ which is about as impersonal is it gets. It would be great to know who it was who was saying this stuff – not just their job title but preferably their full name. And it would be even better if we could see what they looked like so its great when people add their photographs to responses just as Jane Danforth at Nottinghamshire Healthcare Trust does .  (it’s really easy for Patient Opinion subscribers  to upload a photo to personalise their responses).

And the worst kind of response that we see? Well that’s easy - it’s the cut and paste job from someone who doesn't appear to have even read the original posting and doesn’t give any details of themselves except their job title. Even worse is where every response from the organisation is identical so that anyone scrolling through a few can immediately see that the worst kind of ‘tick boxing’ is going on.

People are pretty savvy about user feedback nowadays. They are used to reading TripAdvisor and Amazon reviews. They know that some reviews will be from when the organisation – or maybe the author - was having a bad day. They read a few and come to their judgement. But the responses – well now that's real data direct from the horses mouth itself. So judgements may be quicker and harsher -  ‘Look at this - a cut and paste job for this posting that says terrible stuff happened? How heartless can these guys be?’

 On this reading the response to a posting – especially negative ones - may be more important in shaping the public’s perception of a trust than the critical story itself.

If you havn't yet seen it, our director James Munro wrote a great peice for The Guardian this morning. It's a gentle but optimistic warning about the problems the Government might encounter as they bring in a ratings system for care homes. Worth a read, even if we do say so ourselves.

James' peice for The Guardian - "Beware of the pitfalls of rating care homes" (15/12/2011)

"In times of change the learners will inherit the earth while the knowers will find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists."- Eric Hoffer

We’re always known that promoting Patient Opinion to the public has its challenges. Working with the press and journalists has been something we’ve done carefully, to ensure we protect the people who use our site, whilst spreading the message about what we do to new audiences Our press policy reflects just this.

Over the past year, we have been very pleased to work with the fantastic team at PR agency Journalista. They have perfectly understood our values, and have worked hard with us to try and make sure our press coverage is balanced, far reaching and powerful.

We are so pleased to say that this week, Journalista won a PRCA award for the Patient Opinion re-launch campaign in January this year.

The PRCA Evaluation award recognises the overall positive impact of a PR campaign.

To win, they had to show ‘that a PR team and its campaign are making a significant contribution to the organisation’. We couldn’t agree more!

It’s great that our hard work with Journalista, and the continued development of our media work is being recognised. Here’s to more excellent media coverage and many more awards!