Reinvigorating Care Opinion

I am Rachel. I joined the team part-way through the Care Opinion roll out at Chesterfield Royal Hospital.  Initially, we piloted Care Opinion within two divisions, one being Maternity, and this was received very positively.  This made the decision to roll out Care Opinion to the wider hospital feel easy, and the prospect of using Care Opinion more broadly felt exciting.

Initial plan

As part of the wider roll out and successful implementation, careful organisation and regular communication with the divisions was essential. A big part of the roll-out plan was to consider different ways of creating awareness and raising the profile of Care Opinion. One aspect of this was to ensure that the right people had the right access to the site and were trained in using Care Opinion. I started to increase awareness by reaching out to Governance teams, Heads of Nursing, Senior Matrons and Matrons to ensure I had the correct staff details.

Alongside Emma (a member of the subscriber support team at Care Opinion), we organised several online training events, over several weeks, to be delivered as drop-in sessions.  These were timetabled for an hour and covered the basics such as accessing the site and stories, searching, creating alerts, responding to stories, and reporting. Attendance at the sessions was good, admittedly, initially there wasn’t a lot of interest, but the sessions generated quite a buzz and there was positive feedback in terms of staff understanding and usefulness. Some colleagues even attended more than once – and alongside learning about the purpose of Care Opinion and the site, the sessions also served to help allay staff fears and squash any nerves about using Care Opinion.

The impact

As mentioned, the training sessions helped to garner interest from staff, and we have so far seen a steady increase in stories from different Divisions. Since the initial pilot 133 stories have been told and since our wider roll-out in the summer we have received 19 stories. We are pleased with this, and we can’t wait to receive and read more.

We have seen an increase in different staff responding to feedback and this is being well received by the public, who are advising that the responses are useful on the Care Opinion platform.

Using Care Opinion with the Friends and Family Test (FFT) and Civica

Civica is a service provider who helps us to collect, analyse and report on our Friend and Family Test (FFT) and survey responses, supporting us with the collection of  quantitative and qualitative patient experience data across the Trust. Civica has also had a partnership with Care Opinion for several years, which means they can do two important things: one, insert invitation links at the end of all our surveys, so patients are invited to tell their story on Care Opinion after they have completed their submission. Second, Civica can use the Care Opinion Application Programming Interface (API) to integrate Care Opinion stories with all the other data they collect on behalf the Trust.

What next?

We are keen to keep promoting Care Opinion and to grow the success we have had over the summer - getting the message out there is key!

I plan on some trolley-dashes around the hospital to help raise awareness with patients directly and promote with colleagues. And a future plan is to create some Care Opinion Champions/Super Users within the divisions so that we continue to read and respond to all stories as efficiently as we can. We also plan on some refresher training in the new year too. Ultimately, we are going to keep making as much noise as we possibly can, and carry on what we have started; including inviting two Care Opinion representatives to our Annual Members Meeting which went down well and helped to support us to continue spreading the word.   

Overall

Care opinion is very user-friendly and a great space for both patients and colleagues.  Patients are comfortable knowing that Care Opinion is an anonymous and safe space to share their feedback. Staff have the opportunity to engage with the feedback and write personalised responses, they also get the chance to read some of the brilliant comments about the service they are providing.

I enjoy the reporting aspect, too-it is so easy to use.

We can’t wait to see what happens next - watch this space 😊