First impressions of Patient Opinion

I recently joined the Patient Opinion team from a large private sector corporation. I thought it would be interesting to give my first impressions of working for a non-profit in the health and social care sector, since its completely new to me. Prior to my induction I hadn’t understood what it meant to work for a website, and it’s been really eye-opening for me to realise how much Patient Opinion is a service, not simply a site. Every day staff are moderating the stories people submit, and there are comprehensive rules in place to make sure that authors don’t identify themselves, and that staff being mentioned are protected from defamation. The fact that we moderate stories at all is fantastic, because the decision has been made even though it exposes us legally, and it makes me proud that we set ourselves apart from other sites that avoid this responsibility.

Other people are helping health/care staff make the most of the service through training and support. Meanwhile, my role is to encourage more services to use Patient Opinion, broadening our impact and hopefully helping our financial sustainability.

Unlike other jobs I’ve had there is always a source of job satisfaction in reading the stories people post. Some of them give me perspective on my own life and its challenges, some make me angry at the way people are treated, some make me proud that so many staff are devoted to helping those in need of care and giving people great experiences. All of them feel important and keep me focused on why we do what we do and why its worthwhile. I know not everyone feels like that at work, so I feel lucky and determined to make Patient Opinion even more impactful.

One of the problems with working somewhere where the work feels socially useful is that it can be extremely frustrating when health and social care providers are unwilling or afraid to engage with us because of the fear of negative feedback. I myself have worked in places where ‘performance management’ is a synonym for a stick for management to beat you with, and this fosters a culture of secrecy in the name self-preservation. So I absolutely sympathise with the concerns of those on the front lines.

This is why it is so important to have the support of executives and upper management. There are always going to be negative stories, both because nobody is perfect and because some people will feel that a service has not met their expectations. Patients can be having one of the worst experiences of their lives, and sometimes they don’t get the attention they deserve, and sometimes they are never going to feel attended to enough. There are no perfect nurses, and there are no perfect patients, but that doesn’t diminish the importance of hearing experiences and acting on them when necessary.

And of course positive feedback gives a very welcome boost to staff morale. Where providers engage with Patient Opinion they see a shift in the proportion of positive stories from about 55% to about 70%, demonstrating that service improvement really happens.

My main ambition for my work with Patient Opinion is to spread the message that not all feedback tools are the same. I used to work in the technology sector and I know the sales culture inside out. Its why I left, and its why I’m committed to protecting our public services from exploitation by those whose goal is maximising profit margins without a thought about the fact its taxpayer money that could be spent saving lives in an under-funded NHS. It’s why I want to do whatever I can to make sure our subscribers get everything they need from a non-profit organisation which is all about staff and patients helping one another. I haven’t seen the values that motivate Patient Opinion, the rich insightful stories, and the innovative approach to transparency and change, in the run-of-the-mill feedback tools so widely marketed to the NHS.

We need to be successful because these stories cannot be told, heard and responded to elsewhere. That’s why I work for Patient Opinion.