Dr Dimitra Petrakaki (Department of Business and Management) has released a policy brief exploring the moderation of patient feedback on the online platform ‘Care Opinion’. The brief presents results from in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted with twelve employees of Care Opinion in 2017.

Care Opinion offers patients the chance to share their experience of healthcare encounters with peers and to feedback to healthcare providers. Patients’ feedback takes the form of a story that is moderated prior to being published on the platform and subsequently becomes publically available. The moderation process involves patient stories being tagged with keywords and given a score to assess their level of criticality.

The policy brief highlights the complexity of moderating patient stories in this context. For example, the process of tagging stories and assigning criticality scores requires moderators to make judgements that are surrounded by certain tensions. The tensions arise from the subjective nature of these processes and the conflict between preserving the authorial voice of the patient yet providing both thematic and factual clarity.

The brief also explores how the work of Care Opinion moderators can be seen as a form of care work in itself. This manifests in the care they display which is directed towards the authors of the stories, healthcare providers and other moderators.

The briefing outlines a number of relatively minor ways that Care Opinion could adapt their operations, which would serve to formally recognise the deeply integral values and practices of care.

Read the policy brief: Tensions and Care in Moderation Work: Insights from the online platform ‘Care Opinion’ [401 KB]