'On the third Day of Christmas Care Opinion gave to me...a peek into our dedicated team...'
Our Team
You might not believe this, but Care Opinion is made up of a rather small team of 22 people. 22 people who are dedicated and passionate about humanity and giving people a voice and a space to share their experiences of health and social care services. As a small team, it means we must work together and work together well, and we do exactly that. At the core of everything we do is our mission and our values. We try our best to live out these values in every task we complete. Read more about our values here: Vision, mission and values | Care Opinion
Our Roles
Our roles here are varied, and each role is significant in its own way. Behind the scenes, we have the exceptionally talented web developers-who ensure the site is kept up-to-date and running as smoothly as possible. Sometimes public-facing and always ploughing away in the background, we have the ‘wizards behind the curtains’- our moderators, who are dedicated to reading and publishing hundreds of stories each week. There’s those in the support team who you can often find balancing subscription queries, writing and delivering webinars, answering the phone, moderating stories and even working with students. There’s the administration and operation support staff (who we really couldn’t manage without), the SMT who manage quality, sales and the finances - and who we all rely on for their steady support and knowledge. We are all busy, we all have our individual jobs and workloads, but we couldn’t operate so well without working together and being a team.
How do we stay close as a Team?
‘Team Time’. Team Time is an important aspect of our operation and culture within the organisation. Team Time allows us to get to know each other better, allows us to learn more about our individual roles, how they work and to understand how each role has equal importance in the work we do here at Care Opinion. Team Time allows us to reflect on our work and share ideas for improvement. Team Time is also a space for (lots of) fun, fuddles and frolics.
In November this year, our Scottish team travelled more than 200 miles to join forces with the Sheffield team for an intensive 2 days of reflection, role play performances (our James Munro should be nominated for an Oscar!) and learning. We continued to strengthen our values through learning about personality types and how best to work together. We also organised an amazing fuddle, including a cake made by our star baker (and moderator), Christa Belshaw; sampled Emma Noonan’s (Engagement & Support Officer) infamous broccoli and halloumi quiche and had a mini baby shower for our in-house crochet expert (and moderator) Mhairi Smith. What a couple of days!
Here’s a Care Opinion family pic-a true-to-life family pic: unfiltered, not everyone is looking, and slightly blurry - but here we are!
What have we achieved as a team this year?
A lot! So far, and the year is not over yet, we have moderated and published 24,986 stories, received 4278 phone calls to the 0800 number, fixed around 200 site bugs, had 6 Team Time events, 5 online and 1 in person. We have delivered more than 35 live webinars, hosted 3 successful online conferences and 6 Research chats. Our work supporting educators has continued too, with our well attended Education conference in the summer and supporting the students from Sheffield University on their work experience here at Care Opinion. Finally, we are so proud to have been able to continue our good relationships with our 14,472 members of staff who are using Care Opinion to hear people's stories because ultimately, of course, none of this would be possible without you.
Thank you!
We hope you enjoyed reading and learning a little bit more about our team. We know that our teamwork and ethos is important to the successful running of Care Opinion, but so are the relationships we have with you, our subscribers and authors. Without your continued support, and passion for people’s voices, it wouldn’t be possible.
Thank you to you all and have a very lovely holiday, from all at Care Opinion.