The Daily Post reports that a new online service that allows patients to rate and compare hospitals on issues such as cleanliness, car parking and waiting times has been launched. Unfortunately, it only applies in England.
The service, which can be found here enables patients and their relatives to add comments and give simple ratings on a range of different performance factors. It is very similar to those sites that are used to rate holiday resorts. I have linked to the page assessing the nearest hospital to my family in the Wirral here so that people can see what it looks like.
No doubt some will class this as a gimmick, or the front end of a meaningless choice agenda and I am sure that a host of reasons can be found not to do it, but the site does offer an outlet for people to praise where due and to sound off if necessary and some anecdotal evidence for both the NHS itself and those who are politically accountable for it to see how it is responding to the needs of those it is meant serve.
In that respect I would like to see a similar scheme in Wales. Instead we have site called ‘Patient Experience: Public and Patient Involvement in NHS Wales’, which appears to be more a management tool than an open and accessible way for those who use the service to express their views on it.
In fact both in terms of the complaints system and any method for passing on praise, the tools available to users of the NHS in Wales are cumbersome, difficult to access and overly bureaucratic. Surely we owe it to patients to offer them a more accessible way to comment and assess their experience. Surely those of us trying to scrutinise the billions of pounds spent on this service every year could benefit from being able to see a compendium of patients’ thoughts and assessments on the Welsh NHS.
Perhaps the Welsh Health Minister might take a lesson from England for a change.
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