Do you find yourself getting asked for feedback the whole damn time? Ever wonder what happens to it? I admit to being the bloke who stood in the customs area at Luton Airport for 10 minutes, hitting the Friends and Family sad face just for devilment, but please don’t do as I do…
I want to give you some insight as to how we use patient feedback because it’s a big part of our development process and we have some rather good news to report.
The first thing is to get lots of feedback, make it very easy and quick to collect, without being intrusive. So we give every patient the chance after they’ve sent their askmyGP request online. They get two tick box questions and one free text.
The response has been huge, over 2,200 from nearly 20,000 patient episodes, a rate over 11% of users and it shows how much they care about their experience.
We read every one and mark it positive, negative, suggestion or other. Other is mostly don’t know yet, or issues with the practice rather than the software. We get lots of suggestions which is useful. Overwhelmingly the sentiment is positive, the strong themes being speed and ease of use.
The positives are uplifting but in a way they don’t help as they don’t tell you what to do. We’ve been running at about 10% negatives, they can hurt, and sometimes they don’t pull punches
“I absolutely hate this system. Too impersonal, takes too much time.”
So we’ve taken a hard look at the themes and made a number of changes, some quite subtle, over the last few weeks. Two weeks ago negatives fell to 7%, and last week to 4%. It’s wonderful to see. Positives don’t go up, but suggestions do as patients feel they have something to contribute.
Yeah, OK, I’ll end on a positive note, this from a lady last week:
“Amazing service! It has improved my experience considerably. No more calling for 30 mins at 8am and a fast response from the doctors.”
It’s a team effort. Biggest part of the experience overall is the speed of response from the practice and the care from GPs.
Last weekend I was in London and faced all over the Tube with Babylon’s “GP at hand” adverts. If you’re worried about them bagging 150.000 patients, don’t be.
What we do with patient feedback
Do you find yourself getting asked for feedback the whole damn time? Ever wonder what happens to it? I admit to being the bloke who stood in the customs area at Luton Airport for 10 minutes, hitting the Friends and Family sad face just for devilment, but please don’t do as I do…
I want to give you some insight as to how we use patient feedback because it’s a big part of our development process and we have some rather good news to report.
The first thing is to get lots of feedback, make it very easy and quick to collect, without being intrusive. So we give every patient the chance after they’ve sent their askmyGP request online. They get two tick box questions and one free text.
The response has been huge, over 2,200 from nearly 20,000 patient episodes, a rate over 11% of users and it shows how much they care about their experience.
We read every one and mark it positive, negative, suggestion or other. Other is mostly don’t know yet, or issues with the practice rather than the software. We get lots of suggestions which is useful. Overwhelmingly the sentiment is positive, the strong themes being speed and ease of use.
The positives are uplifting but in a way they don’t help as they don’t tell you what to do. We’ve been running at about 10% negatives, they can hurt, and sometimes they don’t pull punches
“I absolutely hate this system. Too impersonal, takes too much time.”
So we’ve taken a hard look at the themes and made a number of changes, some quite subtle, over the last few weeks. Two weeks ago negatives fell to 7%, and last week to 4%. It’s wonderful to see. Positives don’t go up, but suggestions do as patients feel they have something to contribute.
Yeah, OK, I’ll end on a positive note, this from a lady last week:
“Amazing service! It has improved my experience considerably. No more calling for 30 mins at 8am and a fast response from the doctors.”
It’s a team effort. Biggest part of the experience overall is the speed of response from the practice and the care from GPs.
Last weekend I was in London and faced all over the Tube with Babylon’s “GP at hand” adverts. If you’re worried about them bagging 150.000 patients, don’t be.
You can do better. Easy.
Harry Longman
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