I've recently come across the writings of the self-styled 'Patient From Hell', the journalist Richard Sarson, or Dick Vinegar as he prefers to call himself on Guardian Healthcare Network. I'm certainly not going to slag him off here, because he does raise some very important issues with the NHS from the perspective of an older patient, even if I don't agree with many of his solutions to the problems he identifies.
Unfortunately, criticism is one of the issues most of us that work in the NHS struggle with. I've always thought that the NHS is a bit like our dear old mum in this regard. Those of us inside the service are allowed to criticise all we like because we do it from the point of view of knowledge, affection and respect. People outside the service are not coming from that position, so our response is to be defensive instead.
The problem is that there is some legitimacy to insider views on this, after all, those of us working in the NHS day in, day out do know the system better than anyone else and quite often have a clearer idea of its shortcomings. Generally, patients have a very limited perspective which it's difficult to generalise from, and as anyone familiar with evidence-based medicine will tell you, anecdotes do not constitute good 'evidence'.
But that still does not render the perspective of the individual patient irrelevant - far from it. If nothing else, these views should be seen as the symptoms that they are - something that we must listen to and understand in order to diagnose the problems in the service that they spring from.
So online platforms like Patient Opinion or NHS choices would be very valuable if they could aggregate patient feedback into something greater than individual anecdotes, and these could be used by the service in a systematic way to address some of the problems with the service.
