'Trusts terrified of feedback'

The CEO of complaints specialist Charter UK has added his opinion to the debate regarding NHS staff in some trusts removing feedback from online feedback forums.

Newsnight found that last year, 49% of patient reviews - 105 of 216 - about Nottinghamshire Healthcare Trust on NHS Choices had come from staff accounts. The reviews were originally posted to independent feedback website Patient Opinion, but syndicated to appear on the NHS Choices website Some 47% of those from staff accounts did not declare a conflict of interest. Staff often help patients to post reviews, but the trust acknowledged it needed to be clearer who wrote them.

Charter CEO , Paul Clark, commented: “Whilst it is good to see the NHS collecting patient feedback in different ways, this idea of providing a TripAdvisor-style website for complaints is clearly not the solution. Schemes like these may pay lip service to the idea of patient care, but they are not what people are asking for and not what reviews like Francis or Keogh have called for either. The NHS will actually learn very little unless it can go beyond simply logging complaints and starts taking steps to identify the root cause of these problems instead. It may sound obvious, but if you can’t find the cause of a problem, then you have no hope of solving it. Worse still, if the problems aren’t being identified and resolved then websites like this will actually serve the opposite purpose, highlighting the continuing flaws and diminishing public confidence in the organisation as a whole.

“At the moment, our research shows that many Trusts are terrified of collecting and analysing patient feedback, as poor results could result in their funding being cut. As such, they look for every excuse possible to downplay, re-classify and turn a blind eye to complaints. Providers in this sector should be required to aggregate all of their complaints data, collected across many different channels, so that they can highlight any sub-standard performance, determine the root cause of the problem, and then act on it immediately. Having the right intention is one thing, but driving real change is another.”