The lovely, the rude and the utterly shambolic: Exploring patient experiences in a corpus of NHS feedback
Speaker: Dr Gavin Brookes (University of Nottingham)
Room: LG11 (Waterloo Bridge Wing – entrance B on the map at the bottom of this link)
Abstract: The National Health Service gathers a great deal of user feedback on its services from patients. Much of this exists in “free text” format and so represents a rich dataset. However, the amount of text generated in the thousands of feedback forms patients fill in each year makes it unfeasible to undertake a close qualitative analysis of all of it.
This talk will present findings from a recent ESRC-funded project which used corpus linguistic techniques to study a 29 million-word collection of such patient feedback. The aim of the project was to help the NHS to better understand and interpret the results of its feedback so that it can maintain and improve service standards in the future. Some of the issues considered in this talk include: identifying key areas of positive and negative feedback, distinguishing those concerns that are genuinely ‘urgent’ from those that are merely frequent, comparing how different health care organisations and staff members are evaluated, and exploring how feedback differs according to patients’ demographic backgrounds.
By answering these and other questions, this talk will demonstrate the strengths and pitfalls of applying corpus linguistic methods to the analysis of this type of large body of feedback data, which include navigating the challenge of generating findings that are academically robust but also of practical, applied value to health care stakeholders.