Should the state run feedback sites for public services?

Does it matter who runs web-based public feedback sites? There’s been some pretty heated discussion in the past with lots of people saying that citizens will only trust sites if they are independent of government (and we’ve certainly added our share of heat to support this argument!).  Meanwhile the government and people in the health service often think that Joe Public just doesn’t care and the NHS is a trusted brand that people will be happy to give feedback to. 

Up to now this argument has been almost exclusively assertion-based on both sides because web-based feedback at scale is all so new that there has been little hard evidence either way. But now that NHS Choices has been collecting feedback for more than a year we’re beginning to get some results from this natural experiment in citizen democracy and feedback.

The data so far is interesting. In terms of the numbers of postings both sites generate about equal volumes of stories across England.  Thanks to a Freedom of Information request made by someone on MySociety’s fabulous FOI site we now know that:

·        NHS Choices reject around 24% of all stories submitted compared with a 5% rejection rate for Patient Opinion.

·        Comparable hospitals respond more frequently to stories on Patient Opinion than on Choices. Comparing like with like across both sites  42% of all postings on NHS Choices generate a response from the hospital compared with about 65% on Patient Opinion.

·        Length of story and response are about equal on both sites although stories in general are a bit more positive on Patient Opinion. 

For Patient Opinion we also know that stories are reasonably balanced across all classes: the number of stories from the less affluent 50% of postcodes more or less equals the number from the most affluent. Comparable data is not available for NHS Choices.   So no firm conclusions yet but some interesting straws in the wind.

And of course we’re hardly unbiased in all this. What is needed is a quick study of both sites using full access to internal data by someone nice and independent. So we’ve suggested to the Central Office of Information in Whitehall that this might be a really interesting thing to do before we spend lots more on huge government sites like NHS Choices or – conversely – perhaps waste (rather less) money on independent organisations like us. And happily they seem quite interested. We’ll keep you posted….