Dear Healthcare...

Recently, I’ve been reading about the wives of Henry VIII and it had me thinking about the letters we write and how this relates to public, narrative feedback. 

What prompted this is, of course, the many letters that Henry VIII wrote to his amour Anne Boleyn before their marriage and during ‘The Great Matter’ (his divorce from Catherine of Aragon). The courtship exists quite prominently in these letters and we understandably like to think of them as a window into the past.

Letters are glimpses into histories; we can gain some idea of the thoughts, feelings and beliefs of a person, what their motives and inhibitions are. This is especially the case in Henry and Anne’s letters, as we get a sense of the obsession that Henry felt over Anne through this correspondence.

And what of Anne’s replies?

Well, of that we know nothing at all. In fact, no confirmed letter that Anne wrote to Henry during their courtship is known to have survived in its original form. Henry, like every scorned lover would, probably destroyed all of Anne’s letters during her downfall. What we think of Anne’s replies is often inferred from Henry’s letters; we can get a sense of the letter she wrote depending on Henry’s response. But we never actually see Anne's words, we never see Anne herself.

If we want to think of letters as these windows into another’s life, it is often difficult to do so when that letter is one-sided and the only perspective we have is that of the writer. As is the case of Anne and Henry, we can’t think of these letters as a window into history. Instead, it is more like a mirror; we can see a reflection of Anne, but we never really reach her. We only see Anne in the reflection of Henry’s words.

And of course this has me, and I’m sure many avid historians, wondering: what if we had Anne’s letters to Henry? What would they reveal about her character and ambitions during those early courtship days? What new insights would emerge? It remains, and always will be, a mystery.

It struck me that this absence of one side of the conversation is not unique to Tudor history.

In healthcare, we often hear voices without seeing the reply. Many review sites like Google or Yelp, and even most PREMs, are one-sided. Like Henry's letters to Anne, we see what patients are saying about healthcare. We can see their recommended scores, compliments and complaints; we see healthcare reflected through the eyes of the patient, but we often see so little (if at all) of healthcare’s response. We never really see healthcare itself. Traditional feedback systems leave healthcare largely silent.

But what if healthcare could talk? What if we could hear what it said, just like the insights we would gain if we had Anne’s letters as well as Henry’s? Who would we see?

On Care Opinion, and through this public, relational way of giving feedback to healthcare, we actually do get to see this glimpse. Even in this digital age we still see the use of letters. One story begins with “Dear Dr Melita, Dr William and Dr Jacques, Claire Dietitian, Cassie Haematology Nurse, and All Other Staff,” and another story even ends with “warm regards”. We even have a story that includes a P.S. and many, many more examples.

But what is even more important is that we can see the responses from healthcare. We can see that the feedback was passed on to those named clinicians. We can see the back-and-forth dialogue between patients and clinicians in real time. So too, are staff signing off their responses with a P.S.

These letters to healthcare turn into conversations, two-sided exchanges that expose an interaction in full. We can see how healthcare is both perceived and how healthcare responds. This is healthcare talking, explaining, empathising, feeling, breathing and living. On Care Opinion, we see healthcare not just as an entity reflected in the eyes and words of patients, but as a responding autonomous agent that allows us insight into the experiences of 21st-century Australian healthcare.

Certainly, in fifty or a hundred years’ time, who knows who will be reading these healthcare letters. What insights will they garner into the time that we are currently living in? On Care Opinion, these letters to healthcare are indeed windows into history, and not mirrors. We can see both perspectives; patient and clinician. Future historians will not have to reconstruct one side from the other, as we have had to do with Anne Boleyn. They will instead have the conversation itself.