Is web-based feedback too fast?

We quite often get stories that you would think demand instant action - for example Why was my dad left lying naked on the bed? or patients being able to see others urinating. But then nothing happens. In part this is because managers and staff see such things as regrettable rather than important. Sure, it shouldn’t have happened but nobody died and the real thing to get sorted is to make sure Mrs. Jones in Bed 5 doesn’t breach the 4 hour waiting target.

But in part it is because web-based feedback is so low-friction. For the first time comments are beginning to arrive at the speed of light (or at least the speed that we at Patient Opinion can handle them!) whilst the system designed to receive them moves with all the urgency of a sloth with toothache. The web makes transactions faster and reduces the transaction costs for citizens but it does not reduce the costs of responding for organisations nearly as much. In short web 2.0 is citizen-centric not organization-centric.  Faced with this the  temptation for organisations is to simply cut and paste formulaic replies. This plugs the managerial dyke but does nothing for the citizen or the service.  

From the point of view of service provider – any service provider, NHS or commercial, health or otherwise – this problem can only get worse as more and more people use the web to tell you what they think of you . Two outcomes are then possible. If most web-based feedback is ignored then citizens will tire of giving it and the flow will cease. Alternatively at least some organizations will re-organise themselves and really begin to listen and act on what their customers are saying. Organisations that are driven by sales and profits are likely to be more responsive but what will make public sector organisations responsive short of turning them all into profit centres and losing all the other, wider benefits of them being a public service?

Part of the answer here lies in seeing web-based feedback as lighter, less ponderous than more traditional feedback.  Citizens do this already of course – conversations on the web are just that: fast, transient, informal chatter.  But it’s hard for organisations – especially health service ones who are addicted to the iron cage of bureaucratic rationality (also known as systems, procedures and protocols). For them it’s as if all your life you’ve been building a zoo where all the animals are safely contained and ordered and know when it’s their feeding time and then suddenly you find your job is to play in a jazz band –and to do it fast, hip and on the public stage of web where everyone can see you.

The real answer to this conundrum may lie with front line staff who know in their hearts that real care, great care, always involves as much fluidity and creativity as it does protocols and procedures. Getting things right, giving personal care, has always been about relationships and relationships are perpetually in motion, conditional, responsive each to the other.

So the lessons for us is to try and get the stories on Patient Opinion directed to front line staff rather than middle managers.  And that front-line staff should be empowered to listen, respond and change as a result of these dialogues. In this model web-based feedback becomes a way to nudge, remind and renew the professional heart that has currently been obscured by 15 years of systematising, evidence-based care. Conversations with patients and families after the event, about what could have been better, then become the multiple, systematic drivers of better care. And the web-based exchanges that trigger these thousands of micro improvements can  be summed into reputational measures that rank wards and departments and hospitals for their actual, public, proven ability to listen and learn from those they serve.    Now that's what Lord Darzi would really like.