How responsive are health and care providers?

The essence of Care Opinion's approach to feedback is that it is two-way, not one-way. That matters to feedback authors and staff alike: it creates opportunities to offer support, restore a relationship, share information, show transparency, or build public trust in services.

For many years we have encouraged healthcare providers to respond to the stories people post, and the response rate has slowly risen. But now it seems to be stubbornly stuck around the 75% mark.

In other words, if you post on Care Opinion or NHS.UK, there's a one in four chance you won't get any response at all. I think that represents an enormous missed opportunity.

So, in the spirit of transparency and encouraging responsiveness, we have built a live and interactive chart showing how large NHS and other organisations across the UK are responding, or not, to people's feedback.

From low responders to high responders

Here's how the chart looks today:

The top (pink) chart has a bar for each major provider. On the right of the chart you can see the organisations responding to almost all their feedback. On the left, you can see the organisations responding to none of their feedback.

The lower (grey) chart provides a way to zoom into the top chart. Click on it and a rectangle will appear. Slide the rectangle left and right to explore the chart in detail. You can change the zoom level by enlarging the rectangle, or using your mouse wheel when over the pink chart.

To search for your local services, type in the search box below the charts.

Select an organisation to see more

If you search, or click a bar to select it, we'll show you more detail:

• The name of the organisation (and link to their page)
• Their current response rate
• How they've been doing over time

You can also share the link of a selected organisation with other people. For example, here's a link to the chart with City Hospitals Sunderland selected.

Some NHS trusts are hardly responding at all

If you zoom in on the left of the chart today, you'll see this:

Those grey circles represent four NHS trusts with zero response rates (on both Care Opinion and NHS.UK). Other trusts are responding to fewer than one in five of posts.

If any of these trusts are near you, please encourage them to respond a little more. Otherwise, people posting feedback will continue to feel unheard, and organisations will fail to gain the benefits of openly responding.