What are patients saying about urgent and emergency care?

Today we are publishing a report of patient experiences of urgent and emergency care in Yorkshire and The Humber, based on an analysis of stories posted on Patient Opinion about services across the region.

You can download the report (in Word format) here:

Patient experiences of urgent and emergency care in Yorkshire and The Humber: An analysis of stories from Patient Opinion

We’re grateful to Yorkshire and the Humber Strategic Clinical Networks, which commissioned the report, and to Dr Jackie Goode of Loughborough University who undertook the analysis.

Key themes and findings

The key themes which emerged from the stories of patients and carers included: waiting times; treatments; the quality of consultations; the quality of interpersonal interactions; the physical environment of care; and the organisation and delivery of services.

The stories analysed present a wide range of experiences of urgent and emergency care. Some experiences are consistently positive, while others are mixed. Patients are often careful to report both what was good, alongside what could have been better.

In general, feedback tended to be the most positive for paramedics and ambulance staff, NHS Direct and 111, walk-in centres, minor injury units, and children’s A&E.

More negative experiences tended to be reported by particular (often vulnerable) groups, including people with drug/alcohol problems, frail older people (including those with dementia), people with mental health problems, and women suffering miscarriage.

Why this report is unusual

Research of this kind is not unusual, and the key themes and findings of this analysis are in keeping with those reported by other academic researchers.

But our report is unusual in one important respect: it is based entirely on stories posted by patients and carers to a public website. The data on which our analysis is based is already in the public domain, and freely available. This substantially reduces the cost of research.

Of course, this means that you can read all the stories included in our analysis yourself, allowing you to come to your own conclusions about what matters most to patients. You can also see for yourself where the experiences shared by patients have been heard and acted on, and where they have not.

Crowdsourcing patient experience research

On the Patient Opinion web site over 115,000 stories are now available, accessible and searchable, covering a wide range of NHS services across much of the UK. Using this report as a model, the kind of analysis reported here could, relatively easily and cheaply, be replicated for other geographies, conditions, or kinds of service.

Indeed, other academic studies using stories on Patient Opinion have been undertaken (for example Healthcare experience quality: an empirical exploration using content analysis techniques) or are underway.

Since the stories on Patient Opinion are already in the public domain and are licenced for non-commercial use, they can be used freely by academics and researchers, including for example as a data source for students undertaking Masters dissertations.

Just as patients and carers have generously shared their experiences with us, we hope that researchers analysing these stories will share their findings too, by supplying a copy of their report (or a link to it) which we can add to the site.

This will enable others to benefit from analyses carried out, avoid repeating work which has been done, and add further public value to this unique repository of donated patient and carer experiences.