Clinicians want to connect with patients

We recently held an event for clinicians on the benefits to patients and staff of allowing doctors and nurses to respond to the stories told on Patient Opinion. The reaction was really positive on the day and there was some real appetite from the frontline staff to be the ones that hear and handle patient stories about their services.

Patient experience teams across the UK are often great at responding to authors with kindness, understanding, and empathy. But we heard that too often the patient’s story isn’t getting through to all those that would like to hear it. One clinician told us that she was saddened to discover that a story about her service had been responded to before she had even heard it herself, and that she was even discouraged from responding.

When we talk about patient feedback with people it is never necessary to discuss the need to be patient-focused, it’s what we all want. Sometimes though we run into the problem that there just isn’t an established way of doing things that is appropriate for patient feedback through Patient Opinion. With the best will in the world, not every patient story needs to be told to a PALS team first, and so many of our stories are full of positive and negative things to say that all the good news would be stripped out in a complaints process. There was a lot of nodding in the room when someone said that ‘our systems are designed to create bureaucracy from stories when patients just want you to reflect on their experiences’.

We’re already having real demand from clinicians at the event to get responding privileges because as was raised on the day, ‘patients mostly want to share, not complain, and without Patient Opinion we don’t have that mechanism’. Someone else pointed out the importance of Patient Opinion in their department because ‘staff morale is essential to culture change, and staff get positive feedback almost daily’. Patient engagement at clinician level represents the full realisation of Patient Opinion’s potential, and its something we will happily talk about forever if you get us started.

If you’d like to see a snapshot of what clinicians were saying on the day you can check out our #poclinical hashtag, or better yet, ask your colleagues and clinicians how they feel about patient stories :)