PR agency Ketchum announced last week that it has launched a crowdsourcing website to cherry-pick ideas from the minds of students to help with everyday client problems. Now, the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) has launched a similar portal that will allow nurses, hospital staff and members of the industry association to raise concerns or submit ideas to improve customer care.

The RCN has a big part to play in shaping the future of the healthcare industry, and the decisions it makes can ultimately effect the levels of care seen by patients. For the nurses, being in a profession with such irregular hours means that proactively contributing with ways to improve this isn’t as straightforward as it should be. Yet the value of ground-level experience from the bottom up means that a democratic approach is essential.

The new site, powered by Crowdworks, is available only to RCN management and nursing staff across the UK, will allow members of the community to donate, vote, discuss and collaborate on ideas contributed to the site. The management will then assess the suggestions and develop them into tangible actions if appropriate.

Matthew Batten, customer service project manager at RCN, said, “As a member of the Institute of Customer Service, it is important to RCN to thoroughly scrutinise its customer service offering and look at innovative ways to maintain great levels of customer service. Crowd sourcing represents a good way of ensuring all staff have the opportunity to have their views heard.”

Creating an online resource is a great way to give something back to its members by providing them with a way to contribute easily, and making them feel more directly involved. An additional knock-on effect is that the RCN is likely to receive a much larger amount of response from its members.

The next step is for the RCN is to make sure this isn’t just a ‘nice to have’, and that the input from its members is really used to improve services – not just kept on file somewhere and ignored.

Image via HealthcareRecruitment.com.

Tags: care, crowdsourcing, crowdworks, ketchum, matthew batten, royal college of nursing