Smoke alarm to detect poor patient care

Dr Neil Bacon has written a short piece on his personal blog describing how patient experience (the ratings and reviews that patients submit on their doctor and hospital) can act as a “smoke alarm” for patient safety.

When there are 500,000 reviews on iWantGreatCare, UK healthcare will be safer and better than it is now - thank you for making your contribution to that journey.

Putting patients in the driving seat works

Gosh, it’s been an incredibly busy few weeks.

So much for a summer-break, the iWantGreatCare team has been fully occupied helping our existing clients realise all the benefits of real-time, direct patient experience.

One of the fascinating things about enabling organisations to harness patient experience as an outcome metric, is how rapidly it becomes an essential and powerful tool affecting so much of what they do, and how they do it “from ward to board”. This is exciting and satisfying - sort of like letting a genie out of the bottle, but with every one winning (not just the person who gets to make the wish!).

In addition to the Health Secretary Andrew Lansley once again naming iWantGreatCare as an example of patient-centric outcomes which “put patients in the driving seat”, the Department of Health have released their Outcomes document and Health White Paper.

All those who are passionate about high quality care and patients getting the very best treatment, will be delighted by the new focus on outcomes. Most importantly, the measures to be used include those that are reported directly by patients (including experience ratings at a highly detailed level).

This shift from targets to outcomes is long overdue and - if done properly - will benefit every single user and employee of the NHS.

Exciting times.