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Webwatch
February 2006
The new site at patientopinion.org.uk may well develop into something interesting. It is managed by people who are professionally involved with the whole area of public opinion of health care services. The first thing to check on any website is who runs it and what they seek to gain from their activity. If you click the "about" button on the site, the link "Who runs Patient Opinion?" gives a list which looks genuine. If you search for "Paul Hodgkin" or the other people listed using Google (keep the quotes), you will find a good range of related sites and references.
The next thing to check, is who funds it. The site says that they are funded by "contracts with many different NHS and private sector providers". This raises some interesting questions. If you view the highly politicised area of health care as being purely adversarial, it would leave you with a suspicion that a body funded by "one side" is seeking mainly positive opinion. On the other hand, if you think that the NHS are genuine in their quest for public opinion and that they intend to use that opinion to improve their services, the funding of patientopinion.org.uk would seem very sensible. I must admit to some inside information here, my wife Rhonda, who looks after the Association's Contact list, is a member of the Patient's Panel at our local hospital, Whipps Cross in NE London. She is therefore, participating in the very same NHS opinion seeking initiative as patientopinion.org.uk . It comes under the NHS umbrella of Patient and Public Involvement. The Department of Health has a large volume of information about this initiative on their site at www.dh.gov.uk/PolicyAndGuidance/OrganisationPolicy/PatientAndPublicInvolvement/fs/en.
patientopinion.org.uk gives access to the star ratings of hospitals, a system that is in itself controversial. If they are keen on patient opinion, perhaps they would be better if they dropped this idea as the stars do not come directly from patients.
It does seem the NHS really are seeking public opinion, so a website such as patientopinion.org.uk could be a useful way to gather it. It has a window on the right with links to "Latest, Thanks and Moans." Those of an adversarial frame of mind will welcome this and look straight away at the Moans list, seeking no doubt to reinforce their idea that X is bad. If they fail to find it perhaps they will go elsewhere and never look at the Thanks. Those who are thankful for their treatment may never even look at the site, after all, they do not have an axe to grind. As the site openly admits, they are short of content as they have only just started but a format less attractive to polemicists would gather a more balanced view. Whilst there are some who have had a very poor experience at the hands of the NHS and in contrast, some whose experience is wholly positive, the majority will have a balance of good and bad. The whole point of the Patient and Public Involvement initiative is to shift the balance towards the positive, perfection cannot be achieved. With this in mind, a format based around medical conditions and locality would be better than one based on good against bad.
The search facility allows you to look by postcode or in a general area of interest. As they only have a few opinions as yet, the resulting list is manageable. Once they have gathered a large amount, the format will need to change if it is to be useful. As I write this, there are no entries for ITP. Hopefully, you will add yours!
Happy surfing
Howard