Whistleblow your own way
Give feedback on care (GFC) continues to bring in strong numbers of submissions on a monthly basis, remaining as the top channel for users to provide their feedback to the CQC. The strength of feedback, however, mainly relies on two indicators, the submissions being deemed of value and secondly, whether the inspectors are able to contact the person if they need additional supporting information — so what are the factors that can help improve or hinder the level of contactable submissions?
November 2020 saw a decrease in the number of contactable submissions from 55.86% to 52.25% in the previous month— sparking a deeper dive into analytics. The data had remained fairly consistent from August to October between 54–56%. No significant changes took place on the form content or structure, so what are the external factors that cause a drop in the number of contactable submissions?
Contactable submissions by user group
As discussed in the UX team and highlighted from user research, we’re aware that staff members of a care service or provider have greater concerns with providing their contact details — potential whistleblowers. The GFC form therefore has a tricky responsibility serving two purposes; allowing staff members to raise concerns with anonymity, and encouraging staff members to provide their details as it will make investigations easier for inspectors — the more detail, the better.
What is the breakdown of contactable submissions within these two distinct groups?
Interestingly;
- On average 32.25% of potential whistleblowers provide their contact details, compared to general members of the public on 69.27%.
- The below bar chart shows that this is fairly consistent overtime for both audiences, with a slight decline on the general public in the last couple of months.
- Comparing October and November in particular, there is a key difference of 4% between potential whistleblowers, which is likely to have reduced the overall percentage of contactable submissions for November 2020.
In addition to understanding the percentage of contactable submissions by audience. It’s important to make sure we understand the difference in the volumes of each user group that we receive overtime, in other words, how many users answer ‘yes’ to having worked for the service?
The graph below highlights that the majority of submissions are from the general public 59% and potential whistleblowers are around 41%.
November 2020 saw an increase in the number of potential whistleblowers compared to October 2020, which when combined with the decrease in whistleblowers with contact details resulted in a dip in the overall contactable submission levels.
Submissions by service type
What else can the data tell us? Using PowerBI to merge queries between our submission data and our provider id database, we’re able to link each submission to their service type groups to build a picture for the types of staff members that are more likely to use GFC.
Key things to note:
- 54.8% of potential whistleblower submissions are from ‘Care homes’
- The next largest category is ‘Care in your home’ at 20.67%
- ‘Community health’ — 6.14%
- ‘Hospital — NHS’ — 5.8%
We can then analyse each service type to see if they differ in their response to providing contact details.
Despite a range of values, all services are below the desired target of 55% of users answering ‘yes’ to whether the CQC inspectors can contact them. None of the services have more than half of the submissions being contactable.
Care homes has the lowest ratio at 25% of submissions being contactable. GP surgery — NHS is the highest at just below 46%.
What do we do with this information?
The data informs us that care homes, care in your home, community health, and hospital — NHS are main types of potential whistleblowers.
Care home submissions which are the majority of potential whistleblowers are also the least likely to provide their contact details.
Even when we review these 4 service types overtime, we can see the following:
- GFC moved from private to public beta at the beginning of January 2020, which shows a dip in the % of contactable submissions for ‘Care homes’, ‘Care in your home’, and ‘Community health’ services. ‘Hospital — NHS’ services saw a rise of 5%.
- Since January there’s been a fairly consistent rise in the number of contactable submissions — particularly in ‘Care in your home’ and community health services
- Contactable Care home submissions increased from 21% to 27%
- Care in your home from 31% to 41%
- Community health from 25% to 36%
- Hospital — NHS, however, has remained around 33–35%
Next steps
- A separate KPI needs to be established for not just overall contactable submissions but also to look at the general public and those that work within in a service separately
- UX needs to continue exploring options for how we can continue to encourage staff members to provide their details. Progress has been made over time, however there is still a significant reluctance from care home staff in particular to answer ‘yes’ to being contactable
- Conduct UR sessions specifically with whistleblowers and in particular those that work in care homes to develop our understanding