Innovation
- Patient Opinion is a ‘not for profit organisation’ which runs an award winning national website www.patientopinion.org.uk on which patients, carers and relatives share their experiences of health services. Patient Opinion’s work with health services spans the UK, and the website has, to date, published almost 44,000 stories.
- Patient Opinion is a fully accessible website open to all. Nursing Studies is the first in Scotland to have agreed a subscription with Patient Opinion which means that lecturing staff will have access via a login to enhanced features including advanced search, alerting and reporting facilities across all stories shared about UK wide NHS services.
- The use of Patient Opinion is being explored as a tool for systematically and continuously incorporating patient, service user and carer experience into the curriculum in ways which enhance the student’s learning experience at early and crucial points in their professional learning and development.
What prompted innovation?
- The NMC’s user and carer agenda to increase user and carer involvement and presence throughout the learning journey
- To increase the presence of the user’s and carer’s voice in teaching and learning about nursing and caring
What makes innovation different?
Nursing Studies at the University of Edinburgh is the first higher education institution in Scotland to subscribe to Patient Opinion as part of our service user and carer strategy.
Changes in practice
Patient Opinion presents a fantastic opportunity for staff and students to continuously integrate user and carer experience at early and crucial points in their professional learning and development. Dr Armstrong uses patient stories in her lectures to highlight the service user and carer perspective and to heighten student awareness in relation to patient feedback.
Impact
Student evaluation and feedback. For example:
“I think the site is excellent, reading good stories is always lovely and reading bad ones makes you think about your own practice. It is highly commendable”.
“It was useful to be emailed updates and stories of interest. It acted as a reminder of the resource and most stories were highly relevant to what we were studying”.
Dissemination
Within the subject group.