Excellence and fairness, oh yes!

I couldn't help having mixed feelings when I noticed that Patient Opinion had been mentioned in the new cabinet Office white paper Excellence and Fairness: achieving world class public services. Even though, as we all know, there is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. So of course I am completely delighted that we were mentioned at all.

Here's what the white paper says:

"NHS Choices is a large scale example of the public sector soliciting feedback on health care, building on the example of websites such as patientopinion.com (sic)".

It's that phrase "building on" that perhaps needs a little translation. In ordinary English "building on" has a sense of "taking forward", "developing", or even "improving". What does it mean here? Well, from my (albeit limited) personal perspective three possible translations come immediately to mind.

1. "Copying": the feedback section of NHS Choices is an unashamed rip-off of our work. We saw early plans for the site which included actual screenshots from Patient Opinion.
2. "Dumbing down": currently, the feedback section of NHS Choices doesn't improve on what we had already done - it is far less sophisticated both in vision and in technical implementation. A trivial example: feedback isn't searchable.
3. "Undermining": we are sustained through subscriptions from NHS organisations. But now there is an alternative "Official Feedback Site" being offered to the NHS "for free" (i.e. paid for centrally by the taxpayer). You can imagine the rest.

Try substituting any of these suggested translations into the white paper and see if you feel it reads more accurately.