Northern Ireland officially launched Care Opinion as the feedback platform of choice in August 2020. This enables service users, carers and families to share their experiences of health and social care across Northern Ireland.
The Public Health Agency was responsible for the implementation of Care Opinion across 6 Health and Social Care Trusts:
- Northern Health and Social Care Trust
- Southern Health and Social Care Trust
- Western Health and Social Care Trust
- South Eastern Health and Social Care Trust
- Belfast Health and Social Care Trust
- Northern Ireland Ambulance Service (NIAS)
The vision was clear:
‘To enable impactful engagement with patients and the public in a fully open and transparent way that supports meaningful engagement and drive sustainable, measurable service improvement’
The Public Health Agency wanted to provide a system for all, and they supported the trusts to do this. Prioritising the voices of people is written in at policy level, and so a system-wide approach was needed over the 6 trusts to allow people to share their experiences of all services.
Since then, there has been a lot of work done to embed Care Opinion within Northern Ireland. One of the ways in which this has been achieved is through the creation of Patient Client Experience Facilitators. These are a group of people within each organisation that have been embedded and dedicated to support services and organisations to implement Care Opinion across the system.
It seems this is working. To date, system-wide, there is 3,000 staff listening to the stories of service users, carers, and families. And 5 of the 6 trusts are within the top 10 organistions that are listening, learning, and making changes
Read in their own words, how Trusts are using Care Opinion by reading their blogs on Care Opinion.
Northern Ireland is now over 4 years into its Care Opinion experience and is able to share its knowledge and learnings with other professionals and organisations. The have taken part in every Care Opinion conference since 2021, demonstrating how they use Care Opinion and a national and local hey in 2021 hey also held their very own first birthday celebration which you can watch via the ‘Celebrating a year of Care Opinion in Northern Ireland’ blog
Conference presentations:
Spring 2024: What happens when we start listing to each other?
Autumn 2023: Part 3 - How to respond to critical feedback?
Autumn 2022: How organisations use Care Opinion across the UK
Spring 2022; Using online feedback for learning and change
Autumn 2021: Implementing a system wide approach in Northern Ireland
Care Opinion conducted a staff survey ten months after the launch in Northern Ireland. We surveyed 1,414 health and social care staff registered as users of the online platform. 337 staff responded to the survey, with the large majority indicating strong support for our service, both in principle and in practice.
Positive aspects of Care Opinion identified by large numbers of staff included:
- Support staff learning, quality improvement and service development
- Lifting staff morale
- Fostering an open, learning culture
- Building public confidence in services
- Providing a safe and effective alternative to social media
- Offering benefits to service users, including ease of use, speed of response, simplicity, ability to remain anonymous, ability to avoid a formal complaint
The Public Health Agency won a PENNA award in 2023 for Engaging and Championing the Public for the work they did on improving access to sharing experiences online for BSL and ISL users. Watch a video about this work:
And see an example story with videos
The PHA recently (2024) developed their own online training modules via Learn NHSCNI to help staff in Trusts learn how to ask for feedback and how to respond well to feedback. This is available to all staff in Health and Social Care Trusts via the online learning portal.
The University of Ulster have been at the forefront of using the experience of people in Northern Ireland on Care Opinion for education:
March 2025: Learning from lived experience: Care Opinion in the curriculum at The University of Ulster
July 2023: Care Opinion as a data source for student projects
Finally, this wonderful video celebrates the success of Care Opinion in Northern Ireland over the first 2 years.
If you would like to learn more about Northern Ireland's journey with Care Opinion then we would invite you to head over to our blog page to read more about Care Opinion in Northern Ireland
If your service is based anywhere in the UK and you are interested in finding out more about a subscription, then email the address below, and we will direct you to the right member of the Care Opinion team: subscribing@careopinion.org.uk