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"Biased service"

About: Care Opinion

(as a relative),

My relative suffered sudden life threatening ill health.  The patient raised some concerns via Patient Experience, the Patient Experience service failed in their service to her and they have had to prolong their negative by raising a formal complaint with the health board and wait longer for a response.

As a relative, myself, and several others all suffered as a result of the sudden ill health of the patient, sudden ill health has a huge impact on everyone and Care opinion has failed to allow any feedback to be provided on the experience, because it is negative in relation to the Patient Experience team.  Care Opinion are not allowing negative feedback to be printed about the NHS Service that gave poor service to my relative, they have refused to print any feedback and have caused great offense to the family members and friends who are already in distress. 

I have found Care Opinion to be a cruel and heartless service that is biased towards NHS services and it does not have a fair process in place to treat relatives of a patient, , it also claims to not print multi stories in relation to a patients care when in fact they do, however, they only do this when its positive feedback being provided, they dont print negative feedback on an NHS Service, they have been completely obstructive.
They requested one person completely change their feedback so it sounded better about the NHS Service, the changes meant it wasn't a true or accurate account of what happened but thats what they said they would publish, their version, not the relatives, so why say your providing a feedback service for patients and relatives when your changing the stories to reflect Care Opinions view point and not that of the actual patient or relative? Care Opinions opinion of the service and not that of the actual patient or the relative, this just leaves me questioning this service as it doesn't appear fair or honest and certainly does not give an open and transparent platform for patients or relatives to feedback on, your basically expected to write a story that they want to be written, not your own experience, and if it's negative about an individual you encounter or a specific service, you can for get it being published, they will want it changed to thir viewpoint or they obstruct it from being printed.  

Its an unfair service because more than one family member or friend of the patient may wish to voice their feelings and opinions and Care Opinion is now allowing that to happen when its negative feedback being given, instead they hide behind archaic and out of date policies that dont reflect the current world we live in. 

Awful pointless service, completely left my family in distress and nowhere to voice our opinions and offers zero flexibility.

This service is not treating relatives with respect and is failing to take into consideration that Ill health a patient suffers also affects all those people around them, this service is not set up to accommodate that and I've found it offensive and obstructive to use.

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Responses

Response from Fraser Gilmore, Executive Director & Head of Scotland, Care Opinion 3 years ago
Fraser Gilmore
Executive Director & Head of Scotland,
Care Opinion
Submitted on 27/11/2020 at 17:13
Published on Care Opinion at 17:14


picture of Fraser Gilmore

Dear Aunty T,

We are very sorry to hear about your relative’s experience of NHS services and the impact this has had on your relative and the family.

We are also very sorry that we have not be able to come to a mutually agreeable solution to publishing your and your family’s feedback on Care Opinion, which we are still willing to support the family with.

As I understand it, you would like a number of members of your family to all be able to post stories on Care Opinion about the same experience, and would also like to be able to say things about staff character and motivations.

Unfortunately, the things you want to do conflict with our moderation policy.

Our policy is there to ensure that both authors and staff are treated legally and fairly. More about our moderation principles can be found here https://www.careopinion.org.uk/info/moderation-principles which are clear, transparent, reasonable and important in maintaining a service of public value.

You note that in the past we have published multiple stories regarding the same instance of care and this is true. At Care Opinion we are constantly learning from the experience of building and running a public feedback platform, so it is inevitable that our moderation policy and practice will develop as we encounter new situations.

In this case, we believe that multiple stories describing the same episode are likely to be confusing and misleading to site users, including public users, responding staff, and others. Site users cannot easily assess whether they are seeing multiple episodes from multiple authors or a single episode repeated many times. We now apply this rule regardless of the criticality of the story.

Although around 70% of the feedback shared with Care Opinion in Scotland is positive, in the last year we have published over 1,000 critical stories about health and care services in Scotland. These are publicly available on our site, which includes any responses from services. So you can see from our site that we do not discriminate against negative feedback, and nor do we ask people to change their stories to make them sound better. We do, however, ask people to stick to experiences rather than speculations.

We have been in contact with the author of the first story we received about the experience you mention. If that person would still like to pursue publishing a story, we would be more than happy to continue working with them. They can contact us at info@careopinion.org.uk.

Kindest Regards

Fraser Gilmore

Head of Scotland

Care Opinion

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