Making feedback person-centred

After more than a decade at Patient Opinion, I’ve certainly seen my fair share of systems for patients and carers to give feedback to the NHS. Some, like “Care Connect”, have come and gone. Others, like the NHS “Friends and Family test”, have come and stayed (so far).

One thing that many, perhaps most, systems have in common is that they seem far more interested in the requirements of the organisation than in the priorities of the feedback donor.

They are organisation-centred, not person-centred. They don’t ask “what matters to you?” Instead, they ask: “Tell us about what matters to us.”

The Friends and Family Test, currently mandated by NHS England, is a leading example of this. It asks: “Would you recommend us?” No matter that early piloting showed this question to be confusing to people. No matter that NHS England has accepted that the scores cannot be compared with one another. No matter that the data provide little actionable information to staff.

This is not a person-centred system, but a bureaucracy-centred system.

So what would a person-centred feedback system look like?

1. It would start from seeing the feedback donor not simply as a data source, but as someone who cares about how their feedback is used.

2. It would encourage people to feed back about the issues that matter to them.

3. It would enable people to see whether their feedback had been read, and by whom.

4. It would allow a person giving feedback to communicate with those who are interpreting and acting on it.

5. It would allow a person (and indeed everyone else) to see whether their feedback made a difference, and how.

6. It would encourage everyone who can learn from and act on feedback to participate openly.

At Patient Opinion this is the kind of feedback platform we’re creating, and we’ve come a long way (though there is further to go). We think that by working in this way, we can support new kinds of collaborative relationships between those who need care, and those who provide it.

We think a modern feedback system should be about more than collecting data. It should be about empowering people (patients, carers and staff) to work together for better health and care.

By contrast, systems which simply ask you to "recommend", or to "rate and review", cast citizens in the role of consumers, not change agents.

So given that the Friends and Family Test is mandated in England, what can you do? One answer is to make FFT and Patient Opinion work together: and that’s the topic of my next blog post.