4.3 million reasons to agree with the NHS Constitution

 

So the proposed amendments to the NHS Constitution says that NHS organisations will have a duty to ‘listen and respond’ to feedback. Music to Patient Opinion’s ears of course but beyond our own self-interest its worth thinking why this recommendation makes sense from a trust or commissioner point of view too.

The first reason is that patient feedback is often (not always, but often) a rich source of learning and improvement for organisations and for commissioners. But a second and more important factor is that public conversations about care signal a deeper and wider shift with patients who more and more expect an equal and transparent relationship.

Easy to say of course but have we any evidence for this? Well yes we have because we can see the number of times stories are being viewed on Patient Opinion and these figures are likely to stop you dead in your tracks. Taking one acute trust in the North as our example, they have had 1700 stories shared about them on Patient Opinion. These stories have already been viewed some 4.3 million times and that doesn't count the number of times the same story is being read once it’s re-published by NHS Choices. (Subscribers to Patient Opinion will find the equivalent summary figure for their trust or population on page 2 of their ‘stories in summary’ report). Now 4.3 million is a tidy number of viewings and I think it can be taken as evidence that the public wants more of this stuff. So when the NHS Constitution proposes to make it a duty that organisations ‘should welcome and act on feedback' from patients and carers I think they have got it right.

So how do providers respond? Well the overall response rate across all stories originating with Patient Opinion doesn’t look too bad at 48%.  But look at those responses and you will find that many acute trusts are simply cutting and pasting a standard script with little or no relevance to the story in hand. (Mental health trusts with their stronger tradition of user involvement are generally better.)  Such an approach is understandable given the pressure of work and even more so if you are still operating under the old mind-set that your response is destined to be read only by two people - the complainant and your boss.  But once you realise that on average each story and each response is being read over a thousand times then it becomes clear exactly what is at stake.

Cutting and pasting a standard response is the equivalent of the monotonous ‘your call is important to us’ corporate garbage that drives us all mad in other sectors. But those 4.3 million views are game changers in other ways. As a provider they give you a way to speak to the world, a place to show just how personal you can be, a way to showcase the best of your front line staff (who are the people sending in their stories want to hear from) so that they can show their passion, commitment and humanity. So the public have got it right and the NHS Constitution is bang on the money.  The question is how long is going to take providers to catch up?