Why do you respond to stories?

At Patient Opinion we like to think organisations respond to comments online to show they listen to and, crucially, have understood what patients (and carers and family members) tell them. We think that this kind of interaction on Patient Opinion can foster compassion, empathy and a desire to make services better for everyone.

But what happens when responding becomes a box ticking exercise? When you work to “clear the backlog”? Work pressure, targets and busy days can make replying to patients a chore, but put yourself in the author’s shoes. Would receiving a response in 2016 to your story about losing a child in 2008, inviting you to contact PALS*, make you feel like the hospital had listened to and understood you?  Probably not.

Before laying blame on the responder, let’s have a look at the factors that may have caused this and do a little digging…

Seeing stories as data

Keogh in 2013 told us...

“Patients, carers and members of the public… should be confident that their feedback is being listened to and see how this is impacting on their own care and the care of others.”

Again, we come back to that idea of making sure patients are truly heard. What patients say has value, and not just as a collective sum. Each comment and each story has the potential to affect health services. So why is there a natural urge for organisations to count rather than converse? By making it easy for patients to feedback online, Patient Opinion has also made it easy for organisations to listen to their praise and their criticism.

Reputation management

Services want to show they are listening to patients. Indeed, they often are listening and doing great things with that information too. But just like in a face to face chat, you are replying to a real person on Patient Opinion. Patients tell us that telling a story on Patient Opinion doesn’t make them feel more or less likely to make a complaint, but how they are responded to does. Those who thought the response was unhelpful, missed the point or just ignored the point were more likely to complain.

We can’t hide on the internet. We see lots of patients calling services out for copy/paste responses, only responding to positive comments, or not addressing the author’s questions in their reply.

Responding well can be tricky and you can please everyone all the time but if you write the response you would like to receive if you were the patient, you can’t go far wrong.

The support team at Patient Opinion can support you to respond to tricky postings and we have previously written a blog on responding well.

Pressure to meet KPIs

Sometimes we hear that responders feel pressured to reply to everything from the dawn of time to present day. They need to achieve the magical 100% response rate. Now, we can’t change the pressure they feel, but the question to ask commissioners/big bosses is “is that the right pressure to apply, is it the right stat to chase?”

If stats are your bag, why not track something perhaps more meaningful?

• How many stories have led to a change?
• Which responses are considered the most helpful by a) the author and b) all site users?
•  How responsive you are – what is the time between a posting being published and an initial response.
• How many people in the organisation are listening to the feedback on Patient Opinion?

You can see all this and more on Patient Opinion, and in our humble opinion any of the above hint at more meaningful engagement that responding to 100% of comments.

*Patient Opinion updated its moderation policy in March 2016 to allow organisations up to 3 years to respond to comments. After that we will not publish responses.