Improving the way we work with NHS Choices (part 1)

You might already know that Patient Opinion and NHS Choices share stories and responses back and forth between our sites.

We do this to make life easier (we hope) for our users. The idea is that you can come to Patient Opinion (other sites are available!) and see all the feedback about a service, whether it was originally posted on one site or the other. And, of course, the responses too.

Over the last few months we've done a lot of work to make this a smoother and more reliable process for all concerned.

We're now at the stage where we can offer you the following:

1: Stories posted on Patient Opinion will be sent across to NHS Choices, usually within 4 hours

2: Stories and responses posted on NHS Choices will be pulled across to Patient Opinion, usually overnight

3: If you post a response to a story on Patient Opinion (even if it came from NHS Choices) we will send it across to NHS Choices, usually within about 4 hours

This means you can use either one site or the other, according to your preference, to respond to all your stories. The important thing is that you should never have to post a response twice - if you've posted a response to story, we will link it up to the story on both sites.

There are a few limitations to be aware of.

Stories and responses we send to NHS Choices are re-moderated by their team, and we can't send a response across until the story is moderated. So we can't make this a real-time process.

Sometimes, we won't be able to send your response to NHS Choices. There are various reasons why this can happen. The most important reason is that each story on NHS Choices can have only one response - so if you have a few responses to a story, we'll send only the first. Also, only provider responses are allowed on NHS Choices, so we can't send responses from CCGs, Healthwatch, CQC or anyone else.

There may be a few teething problems as the new system settles in, and we hope to have it all running smoothly over the coming week. So bear with us as we get things tuned up, and let us know if anything doesn't seem to work for you.

We have a few other nice improvements coming in this area too, which I'll blog about in a few days. (Part 2 here)

In the meantime, feel free to let us know what you think by posting a response below.