The value of patient feedback Dr Tom Palser, Consultant Surgeon and Clinical Lead at Methods Analytics and Simon Swift, Managing Director at Methods Analytics examine the need for utilising patient feedback
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omplaints are never something that we really want to hear - but they are vital to ensuring the level of care and continued development within health organisations. Without patient feedback, even organisations at the forefront of innovation may fall short of realising what their patients actually need. It is imperative that complaints are not only acknowledged and acted upon, but also that they are
interacted with in the best manner possible - and AI may play a pivotal role in this. For reference, complaints to the UK NHS by patients or families are incredibly common, with the NHS receiving more than 175,000 complaints about its services every year - this translates into more than 3,300 per week. Our partner NHS trust (University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust) alone receives 4,500 complaints or concerns per year. Allied to this, the cost of litigation is
steadily increasing - £2bn to the wider NHS and £22m to UHL alone, annually. Looking at the issue elsewhere in the world, in 2010, a report by the Harvard Business School placed the cost of medical malpractice in the USA at $55.6bn, increasing the cost of care by an estimated 5 per cent. The vast majority of this, though not entirely, originates with a patient complaint. Yet despite this wealth of information which is presented to us, these complaints are not always used to understand systemic or specific problems in care organisations, disregarding the rich information that they contain. While some complaints may provide very little information to learn from, many provide a very comprehensive analysis of our care systems from the most important perspective - the patient. The sheer volume of complaints causes significant problems in the way
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