e-Criterium, the web of citizen participation in health: an unexpected shutdown

Post available in Catalan and Spanish. Click on the appropriate language link

Olga

In memory of Dr. Jordi Gol

Post available in Catalan and Spanish. Click on the appropriate language link.

Oriol Ramis

The heart and health personnel

Post available in Catalan and Spanish. Click on the appropriate language link.

Olga Fernández Quiroga
Foto by findingthenow on flickr

e-Criterium is in the air!

After almost three years: We are in the air!!!

e-Criterium, the participatory web for our health care system is on-line in its beta version and with several friends and collaborators helping us to test and telling us all we still have to correct and improve but we took off.

Thank you for all the posts received and I invite all the readers of the blog to participate, sharing their experiences, complaints, gratitude, ideas and suggestions … Obviously if you want to test the web you are invited to do so.

Presently, we only hold hospital and health center databases for Catalonia but we plan to complete them with other Iberian health systems.

We also plan to add other community services and we will use your advise to decide how to expand … step by step … adding utilities, finalizing pages still missing, improving our writing and correcting spelling, lexical and syntactic mistakes … step by step …as we are only in the beginning and we want to be always in the business of sharing and discovering new possibilities.

And as I am just now so moved for this news, I will complete the information in future posts.

Now, e-Criterium is also yours.

Olga Fernández Quiroga

Patient Opinion & e-Criterium

Sheffield Big Wheel por Shefftim

Barcelona desde Collserola por Fidel Soler

Available article in Spanish and Catalan .

A web for participation in health

Last Friday, May 22^nd e-Criterium (under construction), a web designed to promote participation in health was informally presented during the Conference on “PARTICIPATION IN HEALTH: NEEDS AND EXPERIENCES, an event organised by the “working group on participation and health” from CAPS

It was “informal” because e-Criterium is not yet operational. However, our British colleagues from Patient Opinion (PO) Patient Opinion, who were our luxury guests for the event, described their active experience, now 5 years old, in the UK. PO and e-Criterium  share objectives and operations.

Miriam Rivas-Aguilar, Patient Opinion’s Operations and Services Manager and James Munro, Director of Informatics and Research explained how Patient Opinion works and some of the difficulties encountered during these years. In the room, Paul Hodgkin, Founder and Chief Executive of PO and Kate Ebbutt, Subscriber Support unit were also present. A lively debate with the audience followed the presentation (in spite of the fact that it  was the last session of a long conference).

Patient Opinion members intervention.

We are very grateful to our colleagues from Patient Opinion, both by what we learn from them and by their generosity sharing their knowledge and their belief in common good. Thanks also to those who attended the presentation and for the interesting questions raised. They will help us a lot.

We were pleased and comforted hearing James and Miriam telling us how, at the beginning, institutions and hospitals feared a web site where people could freely share their experiences in the health services would generate a flood of criticism and negative opinions. The reality was the opposite: there are as many critical comments as congratulations. It is difficult to express greetings or send suggestions, because most patient relation units in health care institutions are only inclined at dealing with complaints and grievances.

From now until the time e-Criterium becomes operational, this blog will keep writing about what we do, how we will do it, what are our goals, who we are, the operation and everything we think can be of interest to future users.

e-Criterium team.