Care Opinion: online feedback for adult social care

Care Opinion is launching across England this week! This important development will:

• Equip service users, their friends and relatives and carers with the power to publish feedback on their experiences of adult social care across England.
• Promote integration by letting users share their stories of how health and adult social care actually worked together for them
• Establish accountability via fast, effective moderation that includes notification of organisations with a duty to protect the public interest such as CQC
• Makes service improvement more likely by building trust with busy staff and providers about how stories about providers are handled
• Improve services and improve localism by connecting to Heathwatch, local health and wellbeing boards, safeguarding boards and complaints department

Care Opinion is fully integrated with Patient Opinion: tell your story of health or social care or both on either site and we will automatically notify registered organisation’s in either sector. Of course we may be a little biased but here are some reasons why we think Care Opinion breaks new ground:

• It’s the first site in the UK to focus primarily on stories of social care rather than ratings. There are already 50,000 stories on the health side of the site with many hundreds of service improvements and you can see all these from within Care Opinion. Wouldn’t it be great if we could give service users and staff in adult social care settings the same tools?
It’s the first site in the world (we think) to integrate feedback about both health and social care. People will be able to share their story of going from health to social care and back again. In public and with lots of people listening
• Finally we think that providers of services will want to use Care Opinion to voice their concerns on behalf of their vulnerable residents.

We want thousands of clients and users to share the good and the bad things about their services on Care Opinion. And we want to help busy staff use these stories to improve services and to go home each day pleased with the great work they have done. Platforms like Care Opinion offer a completely new way to transform the quality of services. Please help us make it happen. Use the site, tell us what you like and what you don’t, and lets see what we can all achieve together.

We are really excited about Care Opinion but we know that like any new site it still needs lots of tweaks and improvements. We’d like your help in making it even better so do please tell us what you think by emailing Jasmine.ali@careopinion.org.uk