What was good? What could be improved?

Increasingly, we're finding that staff of all kinds within health/care organisations want to use the feedback on Patient Opinion for learning, problem solving, quality improvement or even research projects.

That means it's important to be able to find just the stories you need, which is why we have a lot of different ways you can search.

One kind of search we are often asked for is: "show me what people like, or don't like, about this issue or service. What are we doing well? What could we do better?"

I'm very excited to say that we now have the ability to provide this, in a very straightforward way, via our tag searching. Let's look at an example.

Are we communicating?

Everyone knows that effective communication is one of the biggest issues for patients. Fantastic when it works well, frustrating and even harmful when it doesn't. And many of the improvements we need to make in communication are not big, general issues: they are specific, contextual, subtle, sometimes almost invisible to staff - but not to patients.

So to see what people are saying about communication, you enter "communication" in the search box on Patient Opinion. You'll see this:

This is a tag search: it shows you stories tagged with "communication". If you are logged into your subscription, that will be just for stories in your scope. Otherwise, it will be for all stories.

Try it now: see stories tagged with "communication"

But what about just the stories highlighting problems in communication?

What could be better?

To filter further, to see just those stories where the author responded to the question "what could be improved?" with "communication", you click on the search term you added. It will slide down some options for you like this:

Now just click on the option you want: stories where communication could be improved. And there you are:

Try it now: see stories tagged "communication" (could be improved)

Going further

Of course, just like all search terms you can go further. You can add more filters, such as dates, other tags, services or treatment functions to your search.

For example, you could look for stories where communication was good but aftercare could be improved.

And, as with any search, you can save the search to use again, or as the basis for a report, a digest, or a visualisation. So many possibilities!

As usual, if you have ideas on how we could make this simpler or more useful, just post a response below. Your feedback helps us improve too :)