Patient Opinion has been plugging away at innovating in healthcare, using the web, and the power of web2.0. We started with hospitals, and have expanded to cover most of the health service – with our mental health service work spreading across England as we speak! And the Patient Opinion steam engine doesn’t stop there..

For a while, people have been asking us when we are going to cover social care services. Choice and financial considerations are become ever more of an issue in social care, with the continued roll out of individual budgets and personalisation. And with these changes, the need for real time service user feedback in social care is clearly growing.

Well, we are taking our first baby steps into this world, with a pilot project to explore how to extend our platform to residential nursing homes and care homes. Publishing online feedback about residential care homes is not straightforward. Residents are vulnerable, and often not able to speak for themselves. Telling a story about a hospital is fine, as you leave and probably won’t go back again for a while, but residents do not often leave care homes. This might mean we need to change how we think about creating an online tool for care homes.

According to the Department of Health, one in four of us will live in a care home at some point in our lives. That means these homes are part of our lives and our future. But try to find any feedback, or service user commentary on individual care homes online. Seriously, go and Google now, and I’ll buy you a pint if you find one story! This is a much needed service, for a sadly under discussed sector. And we think that Patient Opinion should have a try.

As always with Patient Opinion, we want to use the tools of the web to make it easy and immediate for service users and service providers to work together to make services better. But how best to do this in care homes? The answer might take us away from simple service user stories, and into a whole new online world… So stay tuned for our ideas on what new careworld might look like. In the meantime, if you have thoughts or inspirations about this – we would love to hear them!

The Patient Opinion team has been out and about this week – James, Kate and Miriam in Manchester with our Northwest subscribers and Paul, Tim and Amy in Maidstone and London training mental health trusts to use our new mental health services. It was great for us to meet all the people who came to these events but the high points were two barn storming presentations by people from outside the PO team.

In Manchester we had Maria talking about her experiences using Patient Opinion as head of services at 5 Boroughs Partnership Trust. Maria’s enthusiasm for the way that PO helped her track what is happening on the front line across all her busy areas of responsibility, and to use this feedback to help staff actually make the changes that service users were talking about, clearly impressed the other managers at the meeting.

Meanwhile down south Jason told the story of how as a volunteer at Sheffield’s Primary Care Addiction Services he had been helping service users get the changes they wanted. The first big issue coming up on user’s stories was frustration at not knowing how long they had to wait for their appointment – if they went out for a smoke would they miss their appointment? Why were people going in before them? Just giving out more information in reception quickly cooled the tempers that had often been fraying.  As Jason said: ‘I never lack from a cup of tea from the receptionists now!’

Once this was out of the way and users began to trust the independence of the PO service and the willingness of PCAS to listen, more interesting uses quickly emerged. Having found a way of asking questions anonymously and getting sensible answers back, service users have begun to ask the clinical questions that they have been afraid to ask. ‘We’re still users and have a young baby. How can we get help without any fear that social services will come and take our baby away?’

So what have we learnt? That you need three things to really begin to make PO fly:

·         a steady stream of postings,

·         willing and enthusiastic managers,

·         And involving lost of staff over among enough time for them to really begin to experience the power of users’ stories to help them deliver better services.

It’s also clear that using volunteers like Jason is great way to do this, especially for groups like substance misusers who are skeptical and suspicious of services. 

And if you do this, then your staff and your users will not only tell you useful things, they’ll probably start using the service in ways that you (and us at PO) never even expected.

Oh, and one last thing. If we want to really convince busy people from the service of the benefits of Patient Opinion then we’d better use as many service users and front line managers as we can to speak for us as they are so much better at convincing other managers and clinicians of the benefits of using Patient Opinion than we at PO Central will ever be! So thanks Jason and Maria!

We've previously blogged about the idea of "sousveillance" - the idea citizens can keep an eye on those with greater power in society, using what are now everyday tools such as video cameras, mobile phones, blogs, and, well, sites like Patient Opinion.

But it's always been a little bit theoretical. Not such a big deal.

But now, here comes an example of sousveillance where it really matters - and all done with texting.

Let's hope it works.