My week at Patient Opinion, by Orla Cleary

This week I did some work experience at Patient Opinion and I have learnt a lot from my time here. As I am interested in medicine and aspire to work in the medical field, Patient Opinion has given me a real insight into how it works and how much it contributes to the NHS. Seeing how patient’s stories can make people in high power think about the problems in their service really impressed me, because it doesn’t matter who you are, what job you do or the reason you need health care, your story can make a huge difference to other people’s healthcare experiences.

This week I have done a variety of work ranging from writing for the Patient newsletter to writing up stories. I also researched charities to see if Patient Opinion can become more involved with them. Furthermore, I have really enjoyed working at Patient Opinion mainly the social network side of Patient Opinion because we came up with some good ideas on how to make Patient Opinion more known, especially to younger people. I enjoyed this because being a young person I know mainly what they are interested in and what will draw them to the website. I have also been interested in the patient newsletter as a lot of work.

There hasn’t been any part of Patient Opinion that I haven’t enjoyed, it has been a good experience working here because I now know that Patient Opinion is a place where people can write a story and it has an effect on the NHS for the better. What also fascinated me was how quickly a response/change can happen as stories can be written and within days a change can be made which is quite extraordinary.

I would just like to say that Patient Opinion has a great teamwork basis and I have learnt a lot from that because without those relationships Patient Opinion wouldn’t work as well and wouldn’t be such a good service. I have learnt a lot from everyone here at Patient Opinion as I came to work on Monday not really knowing what I wanted from this experience and I now know that Patient Opinion has given me knowledge and training of what real hard work is like whilst having enjoyment in what you do!

Thank you so much for everything you have given me, and I really hope I will have something to do with Patient Opinion in the future (hopefully when I’m a doctor!).