We are not afraid of listening to our patients anymore

My name is Jill White, and I am the practice manager of the Nightingale Practice and have been using Care Opinion since 2018. We signed up as part of the City & Hackney GP Confederation pilot of implementing Care Opinion online feedback as a way of gathering feedback from our patients instead of using paper-based surveys.

We initially implemented Care Opinion by asking the staff to promote the platform by handing out Care Opinion direct ask cards and advertised it on our envision board.

If a patient goes to a receptionist with a positive comment, the receptionist will ask the patient to add the comment onto Care Opinion. If a patient goes to reception and has a niggle, then they also advise the patient that they can go onto Care Opinion. This is how we make changes and stop a complaint being made – we respond to the smaller issues that can be changed quickly.

In order to share the feedback with staff in the practice, I feed back the stories posted on Care Opinion at practice meetings. These positive comments make a huge difference to staff morale. We all work really hard and sometimes it feels like you are treading through treacle. A positive comment can really brighten the day.

Previously, we had a ‘comments and suggestion’ box in the reception area that I would open weekly and then write a response to the patients. This was very time consuming and really the only people who saw the comment/suggestion/change were the patient and me.

I have found that being able to respond directly to patients' stories through Care Opinion is quicker for both the patients and practice staff. Being able to show publicly that you can plan or make a change is great and even being able to explain why we can’t make a change, and others being able to read why, is a huge benefit.

Using this platform allows us to be open and honest with our patients, involve them and encourage them to let us know what works well and what doesn’t. Being able to sit with practice staff and discuss feedback really has encouraged us to be more patient-focused and making small changes really does have a massive impact for some patients.

Before we started using Care Opinion, I was really scared of patient feedback and I think it’s fair to say that we were all apprehensive of being inundated with negative feedback, but we were pleasantly surprised with all the positive stories we received. Even the negative feedback wasn’t awful.

Tag word cloud - what was good?

We are all someone’s patient and we all must try and get through on phones, and spend time in waiting rooms etc. But with some patient feedback we can explain why queues are so long, what we are trying to do in response to waiting times or even be able to say, ‘actually we have listened to you and we can make this change!’

Using Care Opinion has freed up a lot of my time. It has made me and all the staff at the practice realise that listening to patients and responding is a good thing that can only lead to improvements in the services we offer. We are not afraid of listening to our patients anymore.

Our aspirations, going forward, are to continue to use Care Opinion. We would like more patients to use the system and we will definitely continue to promote Care Opinion.