Listening, learning, improving – How Care Opinion supports NHS England's 10 Year vision

In NHS England’s new 10-year plan, there’s a clear and welcome statement of intent:

“Individual provider boards will be asked to ensure they have robust mechanisms in place to collect and use patient feedback, ensuring it is actively fed back to individual clinicians and clinical teams. This will be the norm across the NHS by 2026”

This is a powerful commitment, not just collecting feedback, but using it well. Not just for reporting, but for learning, improving, and creating a more responsive, human health service.

At Care Opinion, we’ve been working towards exactly this vision for 20 years.

We exist to make it safe and simple for people to share their experiences of care, and for staff, teams, and healthcare organisations to listen and respond. Our platform, which operates independently and transparently, enables feedback to flow directly from patients and families to the people who provide care.

Meeting the NHS’s Challenge Today

The future described in the NHS plan isn’t a distant ideal, it’s something we help make happen every day.

• Clinician level insight: With Care Opinion, stories can be tagged and shared directly with individual staff, teams and departments, allowing for feedback to land where it matters most.
• Timely, actionable feedback: Our platform enables frontline staff to read and respond quickly. Many services respond within hours, creating live dialogue with the public.
• Visibility and transparency: Feedback and responses are published publicly, helping build trust and accountability in care.
• Learning and improvement: Organisations across England already use our reporting tools to identify themes, track change over time, and drive improvement at all levels, from individual wards to board rooms.

Not just a platform – A proven approach

What sets Care Opinion apart is the ecosystem we’ve built around feedback: supported implementation, human moderation, education, research, and impact.

We’ve worked with thousands of teams across England, system wide across healthcare services in Scotland for over 10 years and Northern Ireland for 5. Internationally, we work with a number of services in Ireland and also operate in Australia and Canada. Our model is backed by a growing body of independent research and real-world practice that demonstrates how story-based feedback:

• Enhances staff morale and connection to purpose
• Identifies safety risks and improvement opportunities early
• Strengthens relationships between patients, staff, and services
• Encourages learning, not blame

What people have said about Care Opinion

Here are some examples of what people have shared about their experience of Care Opinion:

“Care Opinion is one of the most impactful and important ways of demonstrating a culture of openness, bringing opportunities to learn and improve, boost morale and spot opportunities to improve that otherwise would be missed.” 

Shaun Maher - Strategic advisor for person-centred care and improvement, Scottish Government  

“Care Opinion is more than just a means to collect patient feedback: it creates all kinds of impacts far beyond what I expected.” 

Dr Holly Mincher – Somerset NHS Foundation Trust

“Care Opinion brings the views of service users, their families and carers to the people responsible for providing their care, in a very practical way. The individual who posts a story has the opportunity to express themselves, feel heard, and be responded to in a helpful manner…Care Opinion has been part of changing the culture of our organisation, towards being more inclusive of stakeholders including service users, families and carers.” 

Martin Jones - Alcohol & substance misuse service manager, HSE Ireland 

“I would encourage everybody, whether they have a positive or negative experience , to share their experience on Care Opinion. Please share your feedback when it's positive, because it really boosts morale. Please share it when it's negative, because a lot of us patients think ‘What’s the point? Nothing will change', but its only through volume and frequency of the feedback that can help a manager or a member of staff put a case together to make changes for the NHS or for any organisation.”

Ann, story author

Supporting you to succeed

For providers now looking to strengthen their feedback mechanisms, Care Opinion offers more than just a tool, we offer partnership.

Whether you’re just getting started or looking to embed feedback into your improvement culture, we’re here to help;

• Set up robust, transparent systems for feedback collection and use
• Equip teams with training, support and insight
• Ensure feedback reaches clinicians and makes a difference to care

Join the conversation

The NHS plan makes clear that patient feedback should no longer be a box-ticking exercise, it should be a driver of compassionate, person-centred care.

If you are looking for a trusted partner to help realise this vision in your organisation, we’d love to talk.

Let’s build this future together.

If you would like to find out more, contact us at info@careopinion.org.uk