{"id":1248,"date":"2022-04-07T16:05:13","date_gmt":"2022-04-07T15:05:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.gov.scot\/participation\/?p=1248"},"modified":"2022-04-07T16:25:16","modified_gmt":"2022-04-07T15:25:16","slug":"care-opinion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.gov.scot\/participation\/2022\/04\/07\/care-opinion\/","title":{"rendered":"Care Opinion"},"content":{"rendered":"

Care Opinion is an independent not-for-profit website, which adds a real-time dimension to the mix of ways in which people can provide feedback about their experience of care. It is intended to complement NHS Boards\u2019 own processes for encouraging feedback and dealing with concerns and complaints.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Care Opinion provides a safe, anonymous route through which people can feedback about their experience of care and engage in constructive dialogue with services about how things can be improved. It also provides an important route through which NHS staff can hear how their work has been valued and appreciated by members of the public. Above all, Care Opinion has created a space for kind, compassionate connections between people who receive care and support and the people who provide it.<\/span><\/p>\n

As well as being an innovative digital platform for collecting user stories, Care Opinion is also focused on accessibility. When you add feedback, you can write things down using the prompts on screen or use the in-built picture collection to tell your story and rate experiences using images. This can help people express themselves more easily, especially if they are less able to write. The Care Opinion site can be altered to change the colours and improve contrast between text and background, and the font size can be increased to make reading easier for people with a visual impairment. The site can be translated into a wide variety of languages, and there is information provided in British Sign Language and Irish Sign Language.<\/span><\/p>\n

Collecting people\u2019s stories<\/span><\/h2>\n

With more than 27,000 experiences now recorded on the site, it has become a rich source of knowledge about how people in Scotland are feeling about their NHS, what is working well and what could be improved. The stories on Care Opinion about services provided by the NHS in Scotland have been read over 14 million times.<\/span><\/p>\n

There were 4,696 members of the public who shared their stories, about healthcare services in Scotland, on Care Opinion in 2021\/22. This is the highest number shared in any year since the service began and these stories received more than 5,600 responses from NHS staff. Care Opinion and the Scottish Government continue to encourage the staff who provide the care which has been written about to respond directly, helping us to develop a genuinely person-centred culture of continuous improvement in our health and care services.<\/span><\/p>\n

The online feedback service contributes towards the Scottish Government\u2019s active support for a culture of openness and transparency in NHS Scotland that welcomes all types of feedback and uses it to inform and drive improvement. The Scottish Government has supported the roll out of Care Opinion across NHS Scotland since 2013.<\/span><\/p>\n