Doctors - start using IWGC today

Quick guide to benefits (for you and your patients) of using iWantGreatCare.

Choice in healthcare empowers the public

The Cabinet Office and the Government’s office of Fair Trading recently held a seminar looking at the importance and role of services like iWantGreatCare in helping the public get better services, including healthcare. The resulting report outlines how and why such an approach is good for the public and creates healthy competition - as well as considering concerns.

iWantGreatCare is used as an example of ways to increase competition and choice in healthcare.

“...consumer choice in public services will only bring benefits if that choice is informed and effective. Active consumers switching from poor performing providers to those that offer better service or value for money can contribute towards growth through increased efficiency in the delivery of public services.”

Baroness Finlay - IWGC: “the results are astonishing”

Baroness Finlay, Professor of Palliative Care at Cardiff University and a crossbench peer, this week wrote an article for the Times, entitled “Solve the attitude problem and start caring”.

Cutting through the noise and politics of the NHS reorganisation in England she states “a dynamic, systemic way to get feedback on the patient’s experience needs to be embedded in every aspect of the service...services need to know what they are doing well and what they are doing badly.”

Baroness Finlay describes how she has embedded real-time, continuous patient experience in the palliative care system across Wales and states that

The results are astonishing.

The “astonishing” work in Wales, as well as the other examples described of a changing culture in the NHS, were delivered by iWantGreatCare.

Why?

Why do we need a new approach to using patient experience?

Patients and the public want to know they are getting great care.

(and existing systems do not make it possible for patients to identify and choose the very best care)

Doctors and nurses deserve to get regular, comparative feedback on the care they give.

(but only a tiny percentage of those working in the NHS get timely, personalised, comparative feedback on how the great work they do is perceived by patients)

Organisations need to be fully and continuously aware of the quality of all the care they deliver if they are to become world-class.

(this ensures excellence is recognised and disseminated, and poor care is identified before patients are harmed)

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.

Citizen power will transform the NHS

An article by Dr Neil Bacon, founder of iWantGreatCare, has been published on the Public Service website. Co-written with Professor David Kerr, advisor to the Government, it describes the unique power that the public and patients have to transform the NHS, and ensure that they and their familes get the very best care.

How can the public properly understand what sort of care their local GP, dentist or hospital provides, let alone be part of a process of improving the quality?

Some would say that sort of improvement programme should be left to the government, hospitals and medical professions. However, evidence suggests otherwise. Perhaps in this case, rather than the doctor, it is the patient who knows best.

In order to start this information revolution citizens need unfettered access to two sorts of information: clinical outcome and performance data (hospital infection rates, cancer survival figures) and the shared experiences of other patients.

Will you be the one in five who gets poor care?

One in five women ‘failed by NHS’ in labour.

This weeks report about the variation in quality of UK maternity services provides yet another example of why patients and the public need to make careful choices about their care - who provides it and where it is is delivered.

But how to find the best care when there is so little information allowing you to compare one hospital or doctor against another?

The views and opinions of other patients and users of healthcare is known to be accurate in predicting where great care can be had - and helping all of us avoid those hospitals that doctors and nurses know to avoid!

This brings with it an obligation on all who use services to provide their feedback: to help the next patient, to say thank you for great care, and to highlight how hospitals can improve what they do.