Reasons to be cheerful

Happy new year! And happy new challenges! Like every new year, this one brings with it new possibilities and new problems.

Speaking for myself, I can say I'm looking forward to both the possibilities and the problems. And sometimes, they turn out to be the same thing (oh, very deep).

So farewell 2016

Looking back over our work at Patient Opinion in 2016, there's plenty to be proud of. We've remained focused on our mission of carrying people's stories into the health/care system in ways that lead to learning and change.

And we've continued to add new, innovative features which support that mission, such as tag bubbles, word clouds and smart alerts.

We're proud to be working with Monkey to help children give feedback about their services, and with an increasing number of universities to bring online patient and carer feedback into nursing/AHP curricula. We're working to support researchers who want to understand how and where online feedback creates impact, or use the stories already told to draw out lessons for policy and practice.

And towards the end of 2016, we started to explore with clinical leaders how Patient Opinion can be used effectively in clinical settings to boost morale while supporting service improvement and staff learning.

We've gained international recognition too: I was one of just two non-US folk invited to speak at the recent AHRQ workshop about online feedback in Washington DC, and Michael Greco, CEO of PO Australia, gave a paper on Patient Opinion in quality improvement at ISQua 2016 in Tokyo.

And hello 2017!

So 2016 was quite a year - but we're not slowing down. It's only 4 January 2017, and already we've released two new features to start you off: email digests and authors in summary reports.

We're working on dementia-friendly story-telling with the experts at Talking Mats, which we hope to have ready in a few months. And of course we have plenty more planned for the year ahead, which I can't share yet ;)

Share the love

To give you an overview of what we do, why we do it, and what people say about us, we've created a shiny new pdf you might find helpful. I hope you'll enjoy it, and do please share it widely.

Connecting People For Change: Putting patient stories at the heart of health and social care (pdf)

So here's to the year ahead! I hope it is a good one for you.