Transparent health services - accountable to the Australian public

Patient Opinion Australia welcomes the release of the special report Investigating for improvement by Queensland’s Health Quality and Complaints Commission (HQCC). The report aims to maximise the health system’s ability to learn from the experience of patients and healthcare providers when things go wrong.

Our experience at Patient Opinion shows that often patients do not want to complain about their health care experience, but would rather offer a comment, whether good, bad or indifferent.Furthermore, there is evidence that comments posted upon the Patient Opinion website lead to less complaints by patients because they have had the opportunity to “be heard”.

One of the benefits of Patient Opinion is that it is a public forum which promotes transparency and accountability of health services.Having an independent site such as Patient Opinion is what the Australian public will find enormously helpful in ‘having their say’ to transform the quality of health services.

Report - special - investigating for improvement - FINAL - 12 Jun 2012.pdf (1.45 mb)