Straws in the wind…. Snowflakes on the storm

 Good post on the always-interesting Puffbox blog. Seems that Tom Watson the (only?) web-savvy member of the government, suggested the folks at direct.gov develop an instant site where parents could find out whether their school was closed by the snow.

The call went out last Friday – and  lo! The site was up and running 28 hours later thanks to some great work by the direct.gov team. Eat your heart out Connecting for Health.

And then a second snow flake drifts by: NESTA are organising The Lab – ‘to give people the freedom, the capital and the expertise to help them undertake radical experiments.’ Especially at a time when there is no money and economics isn’t normal any more.  So what could we come up in health…. If we had a big wand and some money, how would we at Patient Opinion contribute more snowflakes to the blizzard of innovation that we need to do old things better or new things wonderfully? Well, first off, we might sprinkle some snow flakes over the NHS  complaints procedure. Universally agreed to be miserable it desperately needs a fairy Godmother. So why not steal some of the great ideas developed within the criminal justice system around restorative justice and develop a system of restorative redress within health care? We’re itching to build an on-line complaints system built on compassion not defensiveness. And, because it would be based round the Patient Opinion platform, it might even be scalable and cheaper.  We’d also like to develop a General Public Service Improvement Licence. The General Public Licence (GPL)  holds open-source programming communities together so our proposed  GPSIL (although we must think of a snappier acronym) would do the same for public services. By providing a coherent and agreed set of values embedded in a simple licence it could release the creativity of patients, carers, staff,  consultants and service users. Especially when allied to the emerging set of on-line tools. A Creative Commons licence for improving public services.  So any Fairy Godmothers wanting to help you know how to get in touch....