Wrightington, Wigan & Leigh NHS Foundation Trust


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Patient Opinion Helps Patients Receive a Better Service

Newsdate: 24 August 2011

Patients in the Borough will receive a better service as Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh NHS Foundation Trust (WWL) has teamed up with Patient Opinion to help the Trust receive anonymous feedback from patients, visitors, relatives and carers. Patient Opinion was founded in 2005 and is a national independent feedback platform for health services. It is non-profit making and is about sharing experiences and opinions regarding health services within the UK. Judith Marland (Patient Relations/PALS Officer), Sarah Ashurst (Patient Opinion) and Susan Heighway (Acting Manager Patient Relations/PALS)

Patient Opinion is a conversation between the patients, carers and the professionals of the health service bodies. Everyone requires healthcare at various points in their lives and this is the ideal way to share stories and experiences.

On the Patient Opinion website anyone can:

  • See what other patients are saying about the healthcare that each Trust is providing
  • Share their story so that others can learn from their experience
  • See how health services have responded to comments from others

Currently, approximately 150 organisations are subscribers to Patient Opinion and healthcare professionals can listen and respond to the experiences of patients using this platform.
Once someone has contacted Patient Opinion with their comments, they will check that this is not obscene, defamatory or offensive and, if it is, Patient Opinion reserve the right not to publish it or to edit it. If the comments are very critical of a hospital then Patient Opinion may email the person to check that it has been sent in good faith. If it is confirmed that it has, then it will be published and the Trust can respond to this. If the person has not used an email address or does not get back to Patient Opinion then they may not be able to publish any very critical postings.

All published opinions go to the Care Quality Commission which is the national regulator for the NHS in England. Postings are also republished on NHS Choices.

If you have experienced health care recently, either as a patient yourself or as a carer or friend of someone else, you can tell Patient Opinion how it was. They will then pass your comments to the Trust so they can respond and make changes if necessary. We welcome complaints, comments and suggestions as they help us to improve the service we provide.
WWL staff are being encouraged to let patients, visitors and carers alike know that they can share their story using Patient Opinion, as this gives them the opportunity to learn what people think of the services that they provide and to celebrate what the Trust is doing well. If there are things that could be improved on then this is a good way to find out what people think and also to look at any suggestions that they may make. 

The Trust welcomes the feedback from Patient Opinion as this allows us to look at how services can be improved. Feedback from the website http://www.patientopinion.org.uk/ has already resulted in changes being made.