With workloads heavier and more complex for GP practice staff than ever before, online reviews may not be at the top of your radar. But they should be.

Reviews, ratings, feedback: like it or not, these days people share views publicly on just about everything. In many ways the bugbear of modern business, most industries have however been given no choice but to embrace the public forum: positive reviews, it is understood, can be critical to a company’s success.

In the world of primary healthcare, however, the situation feels a little different.

Visiting a doctor is not, after all, like choosing a restaurant: patients accessing care through the NHS seldom have much choice regarding which surgery to attend. Meanwhile, for an already overstretched staff body, it can be difficult to find time to give full attention to patient feedback – let alone to action any findings.

In this article, we look at why practices should be paying attention to patient reviews – in particular, those given on online forums such as Trustpilot. We also examine why patients’ thoughts about their practice’s online consultation system are so significant.

Why the online consultation system in particular?

Because if patients are not having a good experience contacting their practice online, they won’t do so – and the benefits of introducing an online point of access will be made redundant.

Practices will continue to receive overwhelming numbers of telephone calls, patient waiting times will not be lessened, and the potential improvements in patient health outcomes (which better patient access can lead to), will not be realised.

Why are patient reviews important?

Reviews highlight what’s being done well at a practice, what needs to be improved on, and what is totally missing the mark. They draw attention to those aspects of the patient experience that staff need to immediately change, and provide guidance as to which issues they ought to be working on improving longer-term.

Importantly, reviews also foster a culture of listening. This helps to enhance patient trust, and encourages a feeling of mutual engagement.

Patient reviews are not, therefore, merely about giving patients an avenue for complaint. Yes, they are used by patients to publicly evaluate their healthcare provider – and this can frequently include complaints – but, more significantly for staff, reviews properly harnessed can play a crucial component in driving the targeted improvement of care provision.

Providing patient-centric care by understanding patient experience

With public satisfaction in the NHS having fallen to its lowest level last year – just 24% of people reported satisfaction with the service they received – it is now more important than ever that practices seek to improve patient experience. How?

Firstly, by understanding their experience. There is no other way to provide patient-centric care.

Patient needs, perspectives and preferences are not always self-evident. Without hearing directly from individuals, it can be easy to overlook their specific requirements. A single practice’s patient community will contain multiple demographics: aging populations, whose members struggle to access appointments via online platforms; those for whom English is not a first language, and who therefore find it difficult to communicate concerns with accuracy online and/or on the phone; those whose anxiety or embarrassment might create a barrier to their seeking care. There are, of course, many other cohorts, each with their specific access needs.

There is one thing, though, that can be said to be a frustration across all patient groups.

You guessed it: waiting times.

Addressing the key complaint: waiting times

In the British Social Attitudes survey cited above, dissatisfaction with long waiting times figured as one of the top reasons patients gave for poor ratings. Simply put, it is taking too long for patients to get appointments with their GPs. More than just frustrating people, this is also contributing to worsening health outcomes.

Of course, long waiting times are far from an unknown problem. There are multiple factors which contribute to how long any given patient, at any given time, might end up having to wait – but many of these factors boil down to this basic unbalanced equation: practice capacities cannot keep up with an overwhelming level of patient demand.

Efforts by NHS England to address waiting times have involved a shift in focus towards Modern General Practice Access. This access model asks that practices make it easier for the public to contact them by phone and online, so that staff can assess and respond to requests more quickly. Better online consultation systems are a key component in this.

However, many have noted that simply rolling out online access to patients is far from a magic bullet. In fact, if the system has not been well designed or is not implemented effectively, it can even have a detrimental effect.

Some of the possible ‘bad’ outcomes are:

Patients find the online consultation system cumbersome and decide against using it, picking up the phone and leaving the practice back at square one
Those with online access issues are unable to use it, again continuing to resort to the telephone and creating a ‘digital divide’
Access is increased so exponentially, and sometimes without limit, leaving the practice swamped with requests. Staff stress increases, requests cannot be triaged efficiently, and patients are left hanging.

How patient reviews should inform a practice’s choice of online consultation system

In spite of the above, online consultation systems can be effective – and we’re not just saying that because we have created one. Our data shows that practices using Patchs are able to offer, on average, over 8% more same-day in-person GP appointments than non-Patchs practices. GP workload is reduced by an average of 40%, and practices deal with requests in under 2 hours.

These results would not be possible if patients did not enjoy using Patchs. As noted above, if patients do not like the online consultation system their practice has implemented, they will not use it. And if patients don’t use it, where does that leave the practice? Where does it leave its ambition to reduce waiting times?

Floundering.

Real-life reviews

Here are some telling examples.

In the list below, we look at some patient reviews of some of our competitors’ platforms:

Who allowed this system to be put in place, it is purely there to prevent people getting access to health service by making the system difficult and restrictive as possible.
Appalling design, wastes patient time, significantly less efficient than the old system, please scrap it and try again with a different supplier.
My experience of the [product name] online service was confusing, frustrating, time-wasting and felt like a barrier to accessing services.
Convoluted and illogical layout makes this a total pain in the head for service users. Even the feedback link in the portal didn’t work.
Worst system ever created…Told by receptionist Not to use it, its useless, her words not mine. From now on will go to surgery at 8,00am if i am able to.
It is a complete Waste of Time, Money and Resources…It Discriminates Elderly, Disabled People and people who can’t make appointment online.
This is a truly hateful system, which seems to have been designed solely to discourage patients from actually accessing NHS services by presenting a shockingly poor interface into a pathetic excuse for a system. Rarely have I hated an online service more than this.
You can’t attach photos, they only give you a very limited number of characters to explain your problem, yet they make you answer a massive number of totally irrelevant questions.
Absolutely useless time wasting…ironically [my request] was to do with my anxiety and depression and to say this didn’t help is an understatement.
You have to select from a list of 15 items, if your issue is not one of the options you have no other choices. Select other and you will receive a huge amount of irrelevant questions, completely unrelated to your issue.
Absolutely horrified by the fact it took 25min to complete form! […] How can someone witness [sic] mental health difficulties navigate this system? How can the elderly manage this?

These examples are taken from the Trustpilot pages of our top competitors, who presently have ratings of: 2.1: ‘Poor’, 1.5: ‘Bad’, and 1.4: ‘Bad’, respectively.

‘A gamechanger’

Compare the above to Patchs: our Trustpilot rating currently stands at 4.6: ‘Excellent’.

Here are some recent patient reviews of Patchs:

The future for contacting GP surgeries – it works so much better than hanging on in an endless queue to speak to a stresses receptionist. Have used 3 times this year for [practice name] and always got a speedy response. Makes life so much easier
Very easy and efficient way to submit details of a medical problem to my GP surgery, especially using my NHS Login to get started. Very straightforward questions and guidance throughout.
I think Patch’s is a great service. Saves trying to get through on the phone with non-urgent issues, leaving time for receptionists to deal with more pressing work.
Submitted a patches request midday on a Friday received a reply within 5 minutes and was given an appointment 9.15 the next day for my son. Excellent prompt service, easy to use.
Patchs has made making appointments and contacting the GP for anything so much easier and enjoyable! With a toddler, it was painful having to be on the phone for sometimes an hour long waiting for someone. Patch is a game changer!!
I’ve just used Patches to submit a request to the doctor, what a brilliant service. The doctor responded to my message within 15 minutes and I now have a prescription on order with Boots chemist. 10 out of 10 *
Fast replies, easy to understand. Had a appointment by 9.20am the following day.
I was very apprehensive about using this, as it is my first time, I am an old guy not very IT savvy. I worried for nothing. So I shall be using this service again. Thank you.
Patchs is a much better patient friendly system than phoning in for appointments. The response is good and it makes you feel validated, involved and included in the process.
Excellent and simple to use. This helped extremely as I suffer from anxiety.
I was able to use patches to give information on a new concern. I await their response. They phoned me 20mins later saying this sounds like a physio assessment is needed and gave me an appointment for Thursday morning.

Naturally, we are not claiming that every patient, all the time, has a superb experience – but this is precisely why we pay attention to online reviews: in order to identify those occasions when the system has fallen short of someone’s expectations.

We are then able to ask why, and take action to remedy the causes. Our team of developers works closely with our customer support team to pinpoint areas Patchs can improve on, and which features we should be working on next. We release system updates regularly, and new features are rolled out monthly.

How all practices can improve patient experience, right now

Patients need two things: easy access, and quick care.

As we’ve seen, these can either be supported or frustrated by the online consultation system a practice chooses to put in place.

At Patchs, we believe that an online consultation system should:

Allow as many patients as possible to use it. This means: a user-friendly design that permits patients to describe their symptoms in their own words (no constricting multiple-choice questions) and in their own language (Patchs can be used in over 30 of the most commonly spoken non-English languages in the UK).
Ask patients relevant questions, allowing them to share photographs if it will help to more accurately illustrate their condition.
Allow patients to easily manage long-term health conditions and order prescriptions.
Be simple, efficient and safe to use – not only for patients, but also for practice staff. An online consultation system that increases patient access without simultaneously supporting staff is no good: it also needs to help staff achieve effective triage, so that they can respond to requests as quickly as possible.

These are just a handful of Patchs’ aims. If you’d like to find out more about how Patchs’ capabilities fulfil them get in touch with a member of our team.

A multi-access solution for patients, a single portal for staff

It is important to point out that there are always going to be patients who are never going to be able to use online consultation systems.

As stated, our goal is to empower all patients – regardless of their age, ethnic background, or degree of technological literacy – to reach out to their GPs quickly and easily.

That’s why we’ve supplemented our offering with the Telephone Assistant, a revolutionary new technology that is able to transcribe voice calls into normal online requests.

The Telephone Assistant – which is up to 70% cheaper than a receptionist – means that patients who are unable to use online consultation can submit requests on the telephone, with zero call waiting times. And, with all incoming requests filtered through Patchs, staff are able to easily monitor incoming demand.

The result? Staff are happier, patients are happier, and with satisfaction optimised on both sides, health outcomes are improved.

If you'd like to find out more you can find further information and reach out to a member of our team on our Patchs page.