I wholeheartedly agree that patients must be listened to. But that’s our job as medical professionals anyway. This website does not help with that at all. On the contrary, it makes a potentially dysfunctional doctor-patient relationship worse. What’s the point of posting anonymous comments on a website that hardly anyone takes seriously? What does this add to mutual understanding and the quality of care?
Given that this (commercial!) enterprise has been around for a couple of years now and that it seems to have failed to gain any traction with those it claims to serve (the patients), my hunch is that it’s better viewed as another attempt to get a piece of the still big performance measurement budgets in the NHS.
Just read some of the statements of the founder of the website, Dr Neil Bacon. You quickly get a sense that this is a “system” that fits perfectly into the world of NHS accountants and performance managers, but completely fails to understand what it’s really about: the personal relationship between doctors and patients.
My advice: just ignore.
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