WRITTEN ON October 12th, 2007 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Design: Co-creation, Foundation of Trust, What do we want?

Hurrah! Patient Opinion, the independent, responsible, not for profit, ethical, user-friendly feedback service (not to be confused with the clunking great fistful of taxpayer’s dosh that is Healthy Choices) has made two crucial breakthroughs with a competitive win for hospitals in the north west and funding to offer services to mental health users (see below). Let’s let the bad health IT stuff fade away, and see the good rise up!Patient Opinion, the independent patient feedback web site, wins funding
to extend its service to mental health users.

Patient Opinion, the social enterprise behind the pioneering website
www.patientopinion.org.uk, announced today that today that it had
secured funding to develop its service to cover mental health services
in England.

“For the past two years people have been sharing their experience of
acute hospital services on Patient Opinion and seeing what others are
saying, without charge,” said Dr Paul Hodgkin, the social entrepreneur
who set up the site.

“We have learned a great deal about how to do this in a constructive and
thoughtful way which builds the trust of both patients and NHS staff.
This funding will allow us to extend our platform to mental health
services.”

The first steps in the new service are being piloted with 5 Boroughs
Partnership Mental Health Trust in Warrington, with the support of NHS
Northwest strategic health authority.

Dave Thompson, Assistant Director of Inclusion & Partnerships at 5
Boroughs |Partnership NHS Trust said: “We appreciate that being on the
cutting edge of service user involvement in this way is a great
opportunity for everyone involved in this area of our work. We’re really
looking forward to working with Patient Opinion to expand this resource
to users and carers of mental health services.”

The funding has been won as part of the National Endowment for Science
Technology and the Arts (NESTA) ‘Innovations in Mental Health’
programme. Work has begun already to find out what users and staff need
from a feedback platform. The service is expected to be available across
England later in 2008.

NESTA CEO, Jonathan Kestenbaum said:

“It is becoming increasingly clear that the solutions to some of the
challenges we face in areas like mental health will not be found in the
conventional places and cannot be left to government and the NHS. This
project shows there are excellent ideas out there on the front line.
With the right support, local initiatives like this have the potential
to have a big impact across the UK”.

Notes to editors

1. The Patient Opinion website is at
www.patientopinion.org.uk.

2. Patient Opinion is free for public use. Anyone can
share their story or see what others are saying about local hospital
services across England. The service will expand to cover the rest of
the UK early in 2008.

3. Patient Opinion is a not-for-profit, social
enterprise that is independent of the Department of Health, and receives
no commercial sponsorship or advertising.

4. Patient Opinion was one of 10 finalists in the
international ‘Disruptive Innovations in Healthcare’ competition run by
Changemakers/Ahsoka International. It was nominated as one of Yahoo’s
“finds of the year” for 2006.

5. Patient Opinion’s income is generated through
providing subscriptions to healthcare organisations such as hospitals
and primary care trusts, which allow subscribers to set up opinion data
feeds, respond to feedback online, and create benchmarking reports of
their patient ratings.

6. The web site has been available across England since
January 2006 and was originally commissioned by the Department of Health
and the then South Yorkshire Strategic Health Authority.