Piles, postings and pay-off. How our new site will help patients and professionals

People don’t tell the story of their haemorrhoidectomy with the same delight that they post their photos of their wedding on Flickr or update their FaceBook page. Which is obvious when you put it like this since sharing distress and vulnerability takes courage. So it’s worth asking why people do it all and how we can encourage more of them to use Patient Opinion.

People have always made sense of death and disease by telling the story of their illness with others - What happened when I went to the doctor. How I overcame cancer. How I could only have made it with the help of my mum. This need to make sense by sharing is as old as history and has always gone on with friends and family, down the pub or at the school gate. So telling your story on Patient Opinion is part of a very old tradition. In fact some of the most moving stories  are clearly being told precisely because sharing the grief of tragedy with ‘everyone’, globally, on the web, is a positive part of getting through it all.

 

So what are we at Patient Opinion doing to help more people share their stories? Well the key is to increase the pay-off for each individual story – and there is a lot on our new site, due out at the end of January, that should help. Patients will be able to see how many staff are following your story and enlist friends and family to add their own comments to what they have written. They will also be able to say whether they liked the response they got. And you will be able to see where each story has got to – whether it has been read, responded to or an improvement made.

 

But we also want to increase the pay-off for busy staff – after all it is just as important that they find Patient Opinion helpful and easy to use. So it will be much easier to see which staff, departments and trusts are responding and making improvements. Focusing on improvements means that staff can change a negative posting into a positive change. And that’s what we’ll be counting – so it’s not a matter of who has the most critical stories but who has made most changes.

We hope you like the new site when it comes out in January – we think it will mark the next stage in helping patients, carers and staff really get the NHS moving in these difficult times.