But now – at last – we’ve put things right. This week we loaded up the data about acute hospital and mental health care in Scotland onto Patient Opinion.

(The data is kindly made available through the Information Services Division website for NHS Scotland, though it takes a while to extract from the spreadsheets!).

So now we’re able to properly handle the postings already coming in from Scottish patients, carers and mental health service users. If you have an experience to share, we’d love to hear it.

And, finally, Patient Opinion covers the whole of the UK.

If you haven’t come across it, Patient Opinion is about trying to find ways to use the power of web 2.0 to enable people to feed back about their local NHS – and, more, to help improve it. There’s only one catch – we don’t actually have health services across Scotland on our system yet. The shame of it.

In talking about how to do this well, an important issue came up about protecting the confidentiality not only of patients but of staff too – and this is particularly tough in Scotland because of the very large number of very small hospitals scattered across sparsely populated areas. I’ve blogged a bit about this elsewhere.

To cut a long story short, we’re keen to hear any ideas on how we can both enable feedback to be about specific services (which is necessary for it to be useful), while avoiding the risk of identifying individual patients and staff. If you have thoughts on this, do let me know.