As part of Feedback February we’re sharing stories about staff members who have individually named as part of patient feedback on Care Opinion.
Care Opinion is a place where you can share your experience of health or care services, and help make them better for everyone. Using Care Opinion means that by sharing honest experiences of care, we learn to see the world differently. Working together, we can all help make care better.
You can submit your feedback on our Care Opinion page.
The Macular Clinic at Fairview has truly embraced Care Opinion with patients providing regular feedback and the service responding to each in a timely and constructive way. They have embraced it so much that the service has over 100 positive pieces of feedback on the platform. In most of those positive pieces of feedback, one name stands out, Mr Ananda Gupta.
Mr Gupta is a consultant in ophthalmology who joined the Macular clinics around 18 months ago. In that short space of time, Mr Gupta has been singled out on Care Opinion over 70 times for the high quality care he provides his patients and service users. Although, he doesn’t just put that down to himself, but to the whole team in the Macular Clinic.
“It’s an amazingly complex and very nice multidisciplinary team consisting of doctors, we have consultants, we have senior house officers, we have fellows, we have registrars, and we therefore there is a medical body available all the time along with them. We have nurse injectors, we have nurse practitioners, we have sisters, we have optometrists, and we have normal nurses, and we have a very dedicated photographic and imaging team without whose health the unit will just not run.
“So it’s a very well oiled machine and about 60-70 people working at the same time. We see about over 25,000 patients a year if not more”
Mr Gupta believes the Macular Clinic is a ‘goldmine’ of stories on Care Opinion; he highlighted a story that demonstrated the compassion shown for the patient by the team. Mr Gupta read: “I was fortunate to get a cancellation on a Saturday morning for an appointment at the Macular Clinic. I was very, very, nervous and I wanted to convey how impressed I was with the empathy and compassion I was shown by all the staff in the service. They all put me at ease, everyone I met was so kind and caring.
“They were absolutely fantastic. I couldn’t imagine having anyone better to provide my eye care than these people.
“The care was under Mr Gupta, it was great, and the nursing staff was fabulous. They clearly explain what was going on.”
Mr Gupta explained the value that he sees in a platform like Care Opinion and the benefits it has for himself as a staff member but also in how it improves a service.
He said: “We are delighted as to, in fact flooded, with the number of feedbacks we have. Quite a few of them do say about the wait, but you know that is for the management and for all of us to draw a lesson as to what exactly happened on that particular day. But, I think as a consultant singularly named in this feedback, I’m very lucky and very fortunate that I’ve been able to make a difference to the lives and the sight of these patients.
“Being on the other side, I often don’t realise that these are the things that the patients are looking for you know that makes up good medical practice.
“So reading through this you know I’m very happy that Care Opinion had made this happen. I think this particular month is a Care Opinion awareness month, I think we should all encourage Care Opinion and whatever capacity we are to write back and feedback.
“The negative side is that sometimes they might write a negative comment but there is so much to even learn from it.
“They will only tell you something which is constructive, they will not go out of the way to write something which is you know unpleasant but something which could be put to right and put right.”