In the UK, thousands of people are sharing their stories about their experiences of health or care services on Care Opinion. Hundreds of organisations are listening and responding to their patients on our site. Millions are reading these conversations. We envisage a similar sharing of stories about experiences of care services across Australia.
Do you know what your consumers are saying about you?
What does Care Opinion do?
Care Opinion is a website where the public can publish their experiences of local care services. The website allows care service staff to interact with these consumers to help improve care.
Care Opinion is a not-for-profit charitable organisation. We exist to help improve dialogue between consumers and care service providers and to improve care services.
How does it work?
- Members of the public anonymously post a story (positive or negative) on the website about a local care service (we have their email address, but you won't know who they are). Our highly experienced team moderates all stories to ensure they are not defamatory for any member of staff.
- Care service staff can then be alerted when a story is posted about the service, ward, facility or department that they are interested in.
- The organisation can then publish a response to the story on the website.
- The consumer or carer is then alerted to the organisation's response and the constructive dialogue continues.
- Where appropriate, the care service provider can demonstrate whether a change has been made as a result of the story posted on the site.
- People visiting the website are able to search and review all consumer/carer stories about care services. Responses from relevant care organisations are also public. Visitors to the Care Opinion website are able to see the number of people in the care organisation listening to consumer stories.
As consumer choice increases and more people use the Internet to source information to help make decisions, listening and talking to people on Care Opinion is more important than ever. Care Opinion is here to increase dialogue between your organisation and the community you serve.
Care Opinion understands that gathering stories is time-consuming for busy care professionals. Knowing how to work effectively with consumer stories is not as straightforward as working with data or statistics, but Care Opinion has years of experience working with care organisations to help them get the most out of this type of consumer feedback.
We also provide plenty of online help and resources to help you understand what we do, how best to use it, and how to spread the word.
If you are a care organisation interested in becoming a subscriber you can find more information here.
We also offer subscriptions to Commissioners such as Local Health Districts to help open dialogue for feedback between consumers and the services that Commissioners offer. More information on how Care Opinion can facilitate this can be found here.