Patient feedback is intervention, not just information

Patients give their feedback, and Care Opinion shares it online, precisely because they and we want to help improve the quality and safety of care. And with our 20 years of experience, we are confident that patient feedback can have a multitude of helpful impacts on health care.

A growing body of academic research is now confirming our intuitions. In 2023 a wide-ranging evidence review showed that positive patient feedback can have important beneficial effects on staff, including improving wellbeing, work and home relationships, sickness absence and even burnout.

But what about impacts on the quality of care? Previous UK research described how it can be hard for staff to use patient feedback directly to make improvements in care. But more recent US research shows that frequently sharing narrative patient feedback (like stories on Care Opinion) with staff can lead to measurable improvement in patient experience scores.

Sharing narrative patient feedback with staff can lead to measurable improvement in patient experience scores

In a further study, the same US team explored how this happens. They found that service managers would learn from patient stories, and then share them with staff to achieve two main goals: to cultivate a “service-oriented” workplace culture, and to catalyse improvement projects. The result was improvement not only in the processes and outcomes of care, but also in patient and staff experience.

The researchers note: “Our findings also challenge the notion that when it comes to stories ‘people learn more from their mistakes than from their successes’, by documenting extensive use of positive narratives within the clinical setting.”

As new research accumulates, we are increasingly understanding that narrative patient feedback is not just information, but intervention – as I have argued before. It impacts on individuals, teams and perhaps on the wider culture of the organisation too, supporting a gradual shift to a less defensive, more open, learning organisation. It improves care quality not simply through the information it contains, but in the way it changes how people think and relate to one another.

Of course, this can only happen if patient stories are shared and discussed widely, which is exactly what Care Opinion is designed to support. So,  if you want to increase the power of this remarkable intervention, please share the feedback you read with those who could learn from it and use it to make care better.