Creative use of the Invitation Links

Hello my name is Sharon, a Patient Experience Manager at United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust. We place great importance on capturing and sharing patient feedback, and we are continuously seeking ways to improve our services. That's why we have implemented Care Opinion across all our services, enabling us to gather feedback from patients who may not have had the opportunity to provide it before. Our journey with Care Opinion started way back in 2012 and so far we have received over 6,300 stories with 2.19 million people reading them and a response rate back to the storytellers at 80%.

The introduction of Care Opinion has motivated our staff and encouraged them to seek more feedback. Sharing patient feedback directly with our staff has had a positive impact, boosting morale and promoting patient-staff engagement. As a result, patient feedback has become more prominent and has had a greater impact on our services. One simple initiative we introduced was a dedicated invitation link to Care Opinion on the final thank you SMS that we send to patients after they respond to our Friends and Family Test (FFT) survey.

The link takes them directly to the Care Opinion ‘tell us your story’ section so they can tell us more about their experience which they can’t do in the in the standard SMS reply of 160 characters after they have given their rating of their care.

This small addition has had a significant impact, as seen in the graphic below, with many patients sharing their stories via Care Opinion.

We have received just under 1,600 stories via the invitation link so far with almost half a million reads which is really impressive from something as simple as a link in the SMS message!

We believe that patient feedback is crucial to improving our services and providing better care. We will continue to seek new ways to capture and share patient feedback to ensure that we are delivering the best possible care to our patients.