If you havn't yet seen it, our director James Munro wrote a great peice for The Guardian this morning. It's a gentle but optimistic warning about the problems the Government might encounter as they bring in a ratings system for care homes. Worth a read, even if we do say so ourselves.

James' peice for The Guardian - "Beware of the pitfalls of rating care homes" (15/12/2011)

Care homes seminar programme_final v4.DOCX (19.22 kb)

In my last post, I rashly challenged someone to show me online comments about care homes. I called and the internet answered, in the form the lovely Best Care Home,who show the best of care homes, by encouraging positive reviews about CQC 3star rated care homes. As Debbie says“it is about time we heard some positive news about [care homes]”.

This got me thinking… What is the advantageof having critical feedback about care homes? Or, rather, what is feedback for?At Patient Opinion we feel that our aim in healthcare is to facilitate changethrough getting just the right patient story to just the right person in theNHS. This change would not be possible if it wasn’t for the stories having acritical element. Increasingly, this is how public services are changing,through service users donating their experience, to make a difference foreveryone else. The patient is a becoming a co-creator of the service.

So, is there a difference for privatesector organisations like care homes? Both care homes and NHS hospitals areoften demonised by the media, both are plagued by funding issues, and choice isan issue for both. So… the difference? The care home sector is in constantbalance between care and money. The majority of care homes are privatecompanies, with reputations to manage. An understandable fear is that criticalpublic feedback will impact on negatively on their reputation, and then impacton the number of future residents. Maybe the difference isn’t so great then –as hospitals have a reputation to manage, and wish to attract patients.

Which leaves me wondering, what are theoptions for care homes, when faced with online feedback? The options are: sue anyonewho allows people to write critical comments, or choose to engage with theseconcerns online. It’s not an easy path to follow, but embracing thetransformative power of the web might allow care homes to discover a new placein the 21^st Century.

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!