Our Journey with Care Opinion

This Summer, I was invited to speak about the Taunton and Somerset journey with Care Opinion at their event in Exeter. I wanted to share it on our blog too so that hopefully others who couldn’t attend the event can find out more about our learning experience too. This blog is about our experience since we began our Care Opinion journey. Care Opinion was gifted to the Patient Experience team from our Chief Exec and Communications lead to implement back in September 2016. Their support was so valuable as our Chief Exec was really interested in the stories that people were sharing on Care Opinion. It was this great interest and support that further supported the buzz and the conversation around Care Opinion across our trust.

The support from our communications team was so important too, they helped us to train our responding members of staff, share the stories on social media and add Care Opinion information, links and widgets to our website. We also had lots of support from the subscriber support team at Care Opinion right from the start, from resources to personal conversations, this was a big help. We decided to adhere to the tried and tested methodology as the team suggested, to start small and build from there. So, our initial roll out began in four key areas, maternity, ED, Cardiology and outpatients which worked really well.

What we love are the stories

We love that the patients post their stories and that the members of staff directly affected receive them within a really wide public arena. The executive team receive the post in their inboxes, so there’s a real visibility of that story across the trust, then we also tweet them out giving even wider views.

We value the richness of all the feedback we receive. We praise those receiving compliments and positive feedback and we encourage openness, learning and improvements in those where it didn’t go so well.

Once in place we found it so easy to administer.The visualisations and the reports that Care Opinion generates are so helpful, largely because of their visual nature. The way the information is displayed is really compelling and so useful because they help with my own reporting and are great for sharing with colleagues. We also receive regularly scheduled reports, and the ability to customise the reports and set them on schedules to automatically send to staff within different time frames, provides a great way to help keep busy staff involved and keep it live in managers minds.

We are still on a journey

We are still on a journey and our next steps revolve around our aim to continue supporting staff in different areas to feel confident to respond to stories. We are also keen to continue to ensure as many patients as possible are aware of Care Opinion, allowing them to provide us with feedback on their experience of our care.