Finding the right stories for you!

Care Opinion would like a world where all our subscribers can search for, report on and filter the stories on our site to best suit their purpose and role.  

Back in 2014 our Chief Executive Dr James Munro wrote an excellent blog called 'Search for the Hero' to help us all find just the right stories.  I make no apology for reproducing a lot of the content below.  Its worth revisiting this topic though as the numbers of organisations monitoring the site across the UK increases.  This includes commissioners, charities, public interest bodies, and statutory bodies in Scotland, Northern Ireland and England..  

In England of course public feedback on the site also includes NHS.uk stories and the phrase searching is extremely useful for those stories.  

Ordinary phrase searching

If you enter the word diabetes into our search, we'll look for stories tagged with diabetes. If instead you want all stories which include the word diabetes, put double-quotes around diabetes, like so: "diabetes".

We call that a phrase search. The double-quotes are the essential signal for us to do a phrase search.

Advanced phrase searching

Now you know how to do a phrase search, here's how to push it further.

Stem search

You might want all stories which include words like diabetes, diabetic, diabetologist, diabetology. Or to put it another way, any word that starts with "diabet".

To do that, add a star to your phrase search, like this: "diabet*".

This AND that

What about stories which include the word diabetes AND the phrase "blood pressure"?

This phrase search will do it: "diabetes AND blood pressure".

But wait - what about stories including the word diabetes but NOT mentioning blood pressure?

Ah, you mean "diabetes AND NOT blood pressure." Simples!

One OR other

You might want a broader sort of search, like stories including the words sonographer OR scan OR ultrasound.

Enter a phrase search like this: "sonographer OR scan OR ultrasound".

Isn't that OR-some? (joke.)

One step beyond  

Taking that last search, you might find a lot of stories of maternity care in the results. But perhaps you are more interested in scanning for gallstones.

To insist on gall-something (gall*), you could extend the last search like this:

"(sonographer OR scan OR ultrasound) AND gall*".

You need those parentheses in the phrase search to make sure things are done in the right order.

Or if the results from the last search weren't quite right, try this:

"(sonographer OR scan OR ultrasound) AND (gallstones or gall bladder)"

To Summarise

For all of you out there finding the right stories and collecting them into reports and visualisations its worth keeping track of this ongoing blog stream from our clever Care Opinion development team: 'James at Service Design Thinks'.

Of particular note are these two below.  The first is about bookmarking particular stories of interest and the second is how to tag stories yourselves.  Particularly useful to map across to quality domains relevant to your organisation.  

The world is your bookmark

Now you can tag stories too