Latest project news

Have you ever been pushed from pillar to post, just to have a routine condition diagnosed and dealt with? Have you ever travelled all the way to a specialist unit for an appointment, only to miss it because you couldn't find a parking spot? And have you ever wished you could find a way to tell everyone about just how kind, professional and supportive the ward staff was when Auntie Bessie had her knee op?

Well, now you can do just that - and lots more besides - by logging on to Patient Opinion, a revolutionary online system which allows anyone to share their experiences of receiving specialist treatment on the NHS.

Funded jointly by the Department of Health and South Yorkshire Strategic Health Authority, Patient Opinion is a new non-profit company led by experienced GP and social entrepreneur, Dr. Paul Hodgkin. Based on his experience, and the service improvement requirements of the NHS, Dr. Hodgkin identified two major communication gaps which Patient Opinion will address:

• Patients and carers are now being provided with greater choice of specialist treatment options and locations - but they have little information on which options are best for them, without which choosing can be a lottery.
• The NHS has put in place lots of reporting and rating systems - but this formal 'performance' data seldom records the real experience of patients and carers.

Working with Dr. Hodgkin in the early stages of this project, we were struck by how closely Headshift's ethos and approach matched that of Patient Opinion. We're both passionate about empowering people to tell their own stories; we both believe in technology as an enabler, rather than a 'solution' in search of a problem; and we both share a genuine commitment to online community building and finding alternative business and communication models.

For all these reasons, we were determined to avoid turning Patient Opinion into yet another token 'patient' website. Instead, the Patient Opinion communication model will closely follow the 'smarter, simpler, social' approach, utilising a range of social software tool and techniques - ranging from patient weblogs to feed aggregation - to create reliable patient-generated reputations for individual departments and organisations, and to share these with prospective patients at the point when they are choosing which provider to use.

For the first time the collected patient voice will become routinely audible to providers, clinicians and other patients, which means that Patient Opinion has the potential to become a major driver of quality within the NHS, whilst simultanously helping Primary Care Trusts and Strategic Health Authorities to meet multiple policy targets.