As we reach the final post of our 12 Days of Christmas with Care Opinion, we turn our focus to change.
With the year coming to a close, we have reflected on the remarkable impact of listening and stories and explored through the past 11 posts. We’ve shared inspiring blogs of growth, learning, and the powerful role of patient feedback in shaping health and social care. It’s been a pleasure celebrating these milestones with you.
Change – what an interesting word! For some, it’s exciting. For others, it might seem puzzling, or even a little daunting. But at Care Opinion, change is what drives us. It’s embedded in everything we do, from improving our platform to making it easier and more effective for people to share their experiences of care. While change can feel challenging, it is also the key to progress and innovation.
Continuing our focus on change, we now turn to an example of how innovative solutions can drive improvements in patient care and service delivery. In this blog, our Liz explored how the Antrim Area Hospital catering team embraced change by adopting tag-based searches to enhance their feedback process. This small but powerful shift has allowed them to better understand patient needs and improve the quality of their catering services. It’s a perfect example of how change, no matter the scale, leads to better outcomes.
Care Opinion makes it easy for organisations to highlight these changes by adding "change planned or change made" to responses. This feature, though often underused, allows responders and services to mark whether they’ve made a change, or a change has been planned based on the experiences in stories. It’s a simple way to demonstrate the impact of feedback and share progress with staff, commissioners, and regulators. If you would like to learn more about, how can you show change in your responses, head to one of our ‘Know How’ pages and explore ‘Showing whether feedback leads to change’.
This year, we’ve seen numerous examples of services making impactful changes. Here are a few standout stories from 2024 that used the change feature most effectively:
Recent visit to my local Health Centre – This story led to the planned installation of a bike rack at the health centre, offering more convenient and secure parking for cyclists. Although the car park itself won’t be expanded, the Health Centre has taken steps to address concerns by improving facilities for alternative transportation, like cycling. Excellent practical solution with great updates from Angus Health and Social Care Partnership and Shona herself to the author.
A hidden gem - This story led to a change planned as the facility is planning to improve access by working with the Estates department to add additional signage, as suggested in the story by the author. Both Kate and Stephanie at Southern Health and Social Care Trust wrote personal and empathetic responses, addressing the service user's concerns .Through their thoughtful engagement, they demonstrated a deep commitment to improving the service and ensuring the voices of service users are heard and acted upon.
As we wrap up our advent calendar, we look forward to what’s next for Care Opinion. With our 20th anniversary on the horizon, we are excited about the changes planned for the future—new services, new features, and more engagement.
We can’t wait to see what changes our subscribers will implement, and how together, we’ll continue to drive positive learning and change in care. Thank you for being part of this journey, and here’s to more learning, growth, and change in the year ahead!
