Type Healthcare IT Headquarters United Kingdom | Founder Dr Neil Bacon | |
Industry Monitoring patient experience | ||
iWantGreatCare.org is a service which allows NHS and private health care patients to rate individual GPs, hospital doctors and nursing staff on the care they provide.
Launched in July 2008, the service was founded by Dr. Neil Bacon FRCP, the founder of Doctors.net.uk, the largest independent online network of doctors in the UK. The company collects information from patients regarding the quality of care they have received from their doctor and other healthcare professionals, and believes that the capture of real-time patient feedback and experiences will lead to a higher level of healthcare in the UK. The controversial launch evoked outrage from some UK doctors against a system of collecting feedback on the care they provide to patients. In November 2014 the site had collected only 400 patient reviews of GPs, which are published on its website.
Rt Hon Alan Milburn, the former UK Secretary of State for Health, is the Chairman of iWantGreatCare.
Dr Neil Bacon is a commentator on e-health and patient feedback. In June 2012, he formed part of a UK delegation invited to Washington for the Health Datapalooza, a US health data forum attended by UK health secretary Andrew Lansley, US President Barack Obama and Jon Bon Jovi.
The discussion centred on how the two countries can work more closely to make health data a driver for innovation, economic growth and – most importantly – better care for patients.
Milestones
In January 2010, the iWantGreatCare service enabled doctors to create and edit their own profiles to gather patient experience, and started to allow dental patients to rate and comment on their dentists.
In December 2011, Lloyds Pharmacy announced that it will be working with iWantGreatCare to enable its customers in South-East England with the ability to provide real-time feedback on their in-branch experience.
In 2012, iWantGreatCare announced that it had initiated a unique service for the Terrence Higgins Trust to help HIV patients find sympathetic doctors and other health care professionals.
In 2012, Diaverum an international renal care provider, announced that it will be working with iWantGreatCare to allow its customers and staff to provide feedback. Responses will be collected and analysed in multiple languages for an initial roll out covering the UK and Spain. This has now been extended to the whole of the Diaverum organisation worldwide.
Following the UK government's announcement to launch a Friends and Family Test (FFT) in April 2013 which required all NHS Trust inpatients, A&E and maternity patients to be asked whether they would recommend their hospital, iWantGreatCare announced it would be offering to capture this information for all NHS Trusts. The FFT has since been extended to include outpatients, community and children's services as well as patient transport. It has also been extended to NHS staff via the Staff Friends and Family Test.
In November 2013 the company announced a partnership with the NHS Alliance to set up a service which allows patients to rate and review doctors, hospitals and GP practices, and provide the Friends and Family Test which all GPs will be required to provide to NHS England from December 2014.
In 2014 it announced a relationship with Whizz Kidz, a charity that raises money to provide mobility equipment to children.
In 2015 it provided patient, staff and clinician experience solutions to Unilabs, an international diagnostics organisation.
To date (August 2015) iWantGreatCare has published 2,500,000 reviews on its website at iwantgreatcare.org and provides patient experience solutions to over 50 NHS Trusts and 1800 GP Practices across England and Wales.
The company is currently developing the ability for nursing staff to gather reviews, both for revalidation purposes and to showcase the remarkable work undertaken by nurses working in the NHS.