New website lets patients rate doctors

Dr Neil Bacon founder of www.iWantGreatCare.org

A website has been launched that allows patients to rate individual GPs and hospital doctors and share information about their healthcare experiences.

Visitors to the website, can rate their doctor using sliding scales for three questions: ‘Do you trust this doctor? Does this doctor listen? Would you recommend this doctor?’

Dr Neil Bacon, founder of www.iWantGreatCare.org, told E-Health Insider: “This is an opportunity to really help improve the care that doctors give.

“As a clinician, I’m very aware that patients are always looking for recommendations. This site will allow them to see other people’s recommendations and make their own, too.”

The website has been launched just a week after the final report of Lord Darzi’s Next Stage Review, High Quality Care for All.

It said that NHS Choices will be expanded to give patients a wider range of information about primary and community care services, including patient views on the success of their treatment and the quality of their experiences.

Dr Bacon said: “I have had discussions with the Department of Health and NHS Choices and they see this as complementary to what they are doing. It is possible that the views collected on the site will be integrated with NHS Choices in the future.”

Dr Bacon is also the founder of GP social networking website, www.doctors.net.uk, although he resigned as chief executive to take on this project, which has been funded through revenue from the earlier site.

He says the new site will offer opportunities for doctors. “Doctors have to meet certain patient satisfaction targets, and this sort of patient feedback could help to provide this,” he said. “It could also provide them with positive remarks to use in their personal portfolio, when they move jobs.”

The new site will also enable healthcare providers and managers to collect the views of patients for whom they are responsible, using real-time dashboards.

Patients can use the site anonymously, if they wish. The sliding scale questions should take less than a minute to complete. Free text boxes for comments are available, with filters in place to stop profanities. Moderators will check for posts that may be malicious campaigns against a healthcare provider.

Dr Bacon said the methods for collecting data differentiated it from competitors such as Patient Opinion, the independent website founded by a Sheffield GP for recording good and bad comments on hospital care.

“This site is aimed at providing satisfaction figures through the sliding scales for doctors – not organisations, like some of our competitors. The gathering of ratings on a scale of 1 to 100 makes us the only independent source of information in the UK to allow patients to choose a doctor based on the experience of fellow patients.”