Abstract: Over the past decade the notion of “patient experience” has come to be seen as one of the three pillars of high quality healthcare, alongside clinical effectiveness and patient safety. Over the same period, the rise of digital communication and social media has transformed the way that both patients and professionals communicate (although not with one another). Coincidentally, over the same period we have developed Patient Opinion, a national non-profit service enabling people to share their experiences of health and care services online. Currently, over 140,000 experiences of care are available via Patient Opinion. They have been read over 75 million times and we receive 100,000 visitors per week. Most English NHS Trusts and all Scottish health boards use the service at some level, with 7,000 staff and students receiving alerts to relevant feedback.
This seminar will introduce the still-evolving Patient Opinion service, consider impacts for individuals, services and wider culture, and suggest a range of applications in both research and education.

Biography: Dr James Munro is chief executive of Patient Opinion, the UK’s leading independent online feedback service for health and social care. His background is in clinical medicine, public health, and academic research.

Presentation slides available here

Abstract: In this presentation Jessica Mesman will take the opportunity to discuss her efforts to make a difference in practices related to patient safety. She will reflect critically on the dominant understanding of patient safety. According to her the improvement of patient safety should not only be based on error-reducing activities, but also on a sophisticated understanding of the vigor of health care practices. The exploration of latent resources can be considered as a form of exnovation. This approach can be characterized as ‘innovation from within’. In her presentation she will outline an alternative agenda: one that has its focus on the presence of safety and on the competencies of frontline clinicians to preserve adequate levels of safety within real-life complexities.

Biography: Jessica Mesman is Associate Professor in the field of Science and Technology Studies at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. Her current research interests include the anthropology of epistemic cultures in medicine, the method of exnovative ethnography and video-reflexivity, as well as the development of a positive approach to patient safety. In order to develop her arguments in these areas she studies informal and unarticulated dimensions of establishing and preserving safety in health care practices