Isn't patient experience everybody's business?

You don't have to spend long reading the stories people share on Patient Opinion to understand that experiences of care are not just about doctors and nurses.

So you might not be surprised to learn that there are plenty of stories highlighting how people feel (positively or otherwise) about care from, for example, radiographers, physios, speech therapists and sonographers.

Yet there are other staff groups we hear even less about, but who often matter deeply to patients and carers. One patient wrote: "The porter and the lady who took me down to theatre were wonderful. Holding my hand and wiping my tears."

Another patient described a receptionist in the imaging department who went out of his way to help, and another commented on the kindness of catering staff. Yes, even parking attendants can make a significant difference to patient experience.

But, as Jocelyn Cornwell pointed out at a recent workshop on patient experience organised by NHS England, such staff are almost never included in quality improvement work, and rarely get to hear feedback from patients about how they are seen.

So how do we fix that?

Well, if you are using Patient Opinion it's easy to get started: you add relevant portering, catering, reception or parking staff to your subscription. Then you give each person an alert to the stories that matter to them.

For example, to keep your portering services manager in the loop:

Alert me to all stories tagged with porter or porters

or to direct a real-time stream of feedback to your beleaguered parking team:

Alert me to stories tagged with parking, parking fees, parking fine or disabled parking

Of course, you could go further. You could filter by site too, or specialty, or whatever else matters. And you would then have patient and carer experiences going to the people who need to see them, automatically and in real time.

And then, if you wanted, you could enable such staff to respond directly, online, to the story author, sharing improvements as they go.

After all, isn't patient experience everybody's business?