Care Opinion as a data source for student projects

As a new medical school, it was important to us at Ulster University to establish ‘partnership with patients’ as a core tenet within our curriculum. This, among other things, includes valuing the patient voice and one of the ways we do this is through our student selected projects. This blog will discuss how Care Opinion has been used within these projects and share some feedback from students who have completed them so far.

How do we use Care Opinion as part of teaching?

In each year of our graduate entry medical programme, students undertake a ‘student selected component’ (SSC). SSCs are an essential part of medical curriculum and allow students to explore areas of interest as well as develop their research skills. The Year 2 SSC gives students the opportunity to enhance their data handling, analysis and interpretation skills through undertaking a secondary data analysis project.

Students can choose to focus on either quantitative or qualitative analysis for their project. As this is a graduate entry programme, students are coming into the degree with a broad range of prior knowledge and skills but it is more common that students have had previous experience of quantitative, rather than qualitative analysis. Despite this, qualitative projects have proved to be the more popular choice, with ~75% of students choosing to undertake a qualitative thematic analysis on stories from Care Opinion.

What topics have students chosen for their projects?

Over the past two years, students have selected a wide range of topics for their qualitative projects which have helped them better understand the patient experience. We’ve had students who have focused on care experiences in a particular service (e.g., stroke rehabilitation, breast screening) while some have examined interactions with healthcare professionals from a particular department/speciality (e.g., emergency medicine, mental health). Others have focused on specific medical events (e.g., Caesarean section) or on the experiences of particular patient groups (e.g., d/Deaf patients). Finally, some students have considered the experience of family members, rather than the patient themselves. We also know from our discussions with students that they have valued being able to review and reflect on patient experiences in their local area, by tailoring their search to an individual Trust or hospital. We hope to continue to see such a diverse and interesting range of topics explored via Care Opinion in future.

What did students like about Care Opinion and what did they learn?

We asked students in our most recent cohort what they learned from reading patient stories on Care Opinion. One of the most common responses was that students valued the wide variety of patient narratives available, highlighting that patient experience is complex and can vary greatly, even within the same service. This helped them to identify particular factors that were more likely to be associated with good or bad patient experiences and reinforce just how much of a difference staff interactions (big or small) can make to the patient and their carers: “How staff makes a patient and their family feel is one of the most, sometimes even the most, important aspects in a patient's healthcare journey.”

Some students reported being surprised by the patient narratives, particularly the number of positive stories: “I was surprised to see so many positive comments so it was a pleasant experience. I felt patients were excellent at giving constructive criticism.” Others shared that it was insightful to get a better understanding of how and why patient and staff experiences might not always align with one another. They believed that Care Opinion provided patients with a valuable opportunity to have their voice heard, particularly when their feedback was something that would not be easy to share face-to-face. Finally, we know from speaking with our students, that they found it empowering to use Care Opinion stories as the basis of their work; knowing that there are real people behind the data and knowing that these stories can make a difference to their own future practice.

Did Care Opinion work well for this project?

Most students were able to find patient stories related to their area of interest and overall feedback was very positive. However, for some less common healthcare experiences, there may not have been a suitable number of stories available to analyse and students needed to broaden their topic of interest as a result. On the other hand, some students found that there were so many relevant patient stories, and they had difficulty narrowing their search results to appropriately suit the scope of the project. To help overcome this, we will be providing future cohorts with additional guidance on identifying an appropriate topic/research question and how to use the search functionality efficiently.

Most stories on Care Opinion are posted by the patient themselves or their family members, but they can also be posted by healthcare staff on the patient’s behalf. Some students highlighted that this seemed to be the case in some services more than others, which added an additional layer of complexity to their analysis, since these stories were more likely to use similar or repetitive language and so it was more difficult to get a sense of the true patient experience. However, students hoped that, with growing patient awareness of Care Opinion, more patient-authored stories would become available to analyse within these services in future.

Valuing patients and their opinions is something that the Ulster curriculum strives for, and this was reinforced through the introduction of the SSC project using Care Opinion. Students who engaged with Care Opinion demonstrated this important value in the outputs they created and their feedback showed how health professional engagement with patient narratives, particularly patient-authored stories, can have a large and positive impact on respect for patients.

This blog post is co-authored by Dr Sarah Butter, Lecturer in Psychology and Student Selected Component Lead and Dr Trish Harris, Associate Head of School, Director of Education and MBBS Course Director, Ulster University.