So, how are you doing?

 Sometimes, an organisation using Patient Opinion will ask us: “So how are we doing? What are other organisations doing? How do we compare?”

And, indeed, we often ask similar questions ourselves: how are you doing? Is Patient Opinion bringing value to your organisation? Is it helpful in changing your services, staff or culture?

Over the past 10 years, we have worked with hundreds of organisations and seen wide variation in how they use – or don’t use – Patient Opinion. Some, like Nottinghamshire Healthcare Foundation Trust, Locala, Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust, and others, are now global pioneers. In such places, the practice of real-time, open, patient-initiated change is becoming standard operating procedure. It’s real, and making a tangible difference to services.

Elsewhere, there are still plenty of health and social care organisations which regard the very idea of online patient feedback with suspicion, or a large measure of fear.

So to support further thinking about “what does good look like?” we’ve taken our experience over the past 10 years and boiled it down into a document which sets out nine levels of organisational development in relation to online feedback. You can download it here:

Organisational culture and public online feedback (PDF file)

You might find it interesting to reflect on which level best reflects your own organisational or departmental culture.

It’s worth saying that, as always, we know much more about the past than we do about the future. So although we have a good idea of the journey many organisations have been on, we can only speculate on where the journey might yet take them – and us.

And of course there is plenty more learning still to do, and we must learn from one another. So, if you have the time and energy, read the document and add your thoughts below.