The Gift of Feedback

My name is Mairead Casey, Patient Client Experience Facilitator for the Southern Health and Social Care Trust (SHSCT). A key component of this role is to support services and staff with the Trust to promote, engage with and respond to patient stories that are submitted via the Care Opinion feedback platform, along with my colleague Christine Armstrong, Patient Client Experience Facilitator.

As a team we regularly review Care Opinion stories and prepare reports within the Trust to ensure that the information we receive is shared at all levels within the organisation. When looking back over the past 12 months we noticed a considerable dip in stories over the festive period in 2024. We decided to be proactive in 2025 to keep the patient stories coming in over the month of December 2025 and decided to meet with our colleagues in Communications Team (who are always a wonderful support to us) in November 2025.  An action plan was agreed, an integral part of the action plan was an initiative entitled: 'Give the Gift of Feedback'.

We are fortunate within SHSCT that the majority of our feedback is positive and we felt that it would benefit our staff if they could perhaps see how much they are valued by the public, but also it would allow us to look at areas where perhaps improvement was required.

The aim of Give the gift of feedback was to raise the profile of Care Opinion with staff and with members of the public so that more stories would be submitted via Care Opinion.

Staff Awareness

• We were allocated a slot at the Trust’s weekly catch up with Chief Executive that is open to all staff to attend - “Chat with the Chief” on 2 December 2025. Christine discussed Care Opinion and the importance of letting our patients and service users know how to access it.

• Promoted in weekly staff newsletter – “southern-i”. This included a recording of Chat with the Chief from 2 December and video for staff to view and share

Public Awareness

• Christine in the meantime with the support from our Communications team, Liz, we created the below promotional video for patients and service users with the angle of 'Give the gift of feedback'. This was posted on Trust social media channel 3 times during December – click here

The outcome...

It worked!

102% increase. We went from 88 stories in Dec 2024 to 178 stories in Dec 2025. These stories have been read by the public 8,756 times to date (as of 27/01/26) and a huge 90% of these stories were entirely positive. Stories are still coming through - we have received a further 221 since 01/01/26 (as of 12/02/26).

This increase in story numbers allowed for stories to be printed off and displayed for the public to see, see our Care Opinion boards in acute setting.

Following the success of this campaign, we felt that it was important to thank the public and our staff for their support, and again with assistance from Liz in our Communications Dept we developed a press release for social media channels that was published on 16/01/2026 Facebook post.

We also prepared another article for our staff newsletter for 17/01/26 to thank all hard working staff within Southern Health & Social Care Trust for ensuring all the stories shared were read and that each one received a personal response for a member of trust staff.

We are very grateful to every person who has shared their story with us - receiving feedback from our patients, families and carers is indeed a gift that our staff really appreciate.