This press policy outlines our company values, the nature of our working relationship with the press and how we aim to use media coverage to achieve our goals for people who use health and care services.
We work with lots of people and we want to ensure that every voice is heard. This means one of the most important groups we work with is the media.
Our coverage serves two purposes.
Firstly we share what we have learned about the quality of health and social care and what people think of it. We work with the media in a number of ways to do this: by releasing comments to the press that respond to the news agenda; distributing research and statistics about the quality of experience; or raising revealing issues through individuals’ stories.
We also rely on media coverage to promote Care Opinion to a wider audience, to increase the number of people using the website and drive citizen-led service improvement.
We work with a wide range of media outlets that include national and regional newspapers, television and radio broadcasting, health and social care industry press, and websites or blogs from all sides of the political spectrum.
We oppose any working relationship that compromises our independence and values of inclusivity and transparency. This means that while we do occasionally provide exclusive content for a media outlet, we do not enter in any long term exclusive deals that would prevent us from sharing our message with as wide a variety of media outlets as possible.