Category: Ratings

Automated feedback texts

An article on the Guardian’s ‘Comment is free’ website is attracting a lot of attention. Within two days of posting, it has been ‘shared’ on social media nearly 27,000 times and attracted 650 comments. The article is a first-person account of experiencing a miscarriage. The couple received excellent, sympathetic care, undermined somewhat by an automated text the next day asking, ‘How likely are you to recommend our A&E department to your friends and family if they needed similar care or treatment?’ The text presented a 5-point Lickert scale and asked respondents to text back 1 to 5 on the basis of how likely there were to recommend that A&E.

Gifts as commodities in the NHS?

I have been reading an influential essay by Arjun Appadurai, ‘Introduction: commodities and the politics of value’ from Appadurai, A. (ed.) (1986) The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: CUP, pp. 3–63.

Although focused on ‘commodities’ which implies an economic context that is missing (overly at least) from the NHS context, points in the essay have made me think about how one might frame a critical study of gratitude and the giving of gifts to healthcare professionals.

It is not customary to give gifts in the NHS (although this needs further research). Most anthropological studies of gift-giving are focused on the trajectory of gifts within relatively isolated, small-scale societies.

Patients queue to thank GP Richard Hughes

This is a lovely story of how patients queued for hours to thank Dr Richard Hughes on his retirement. An ‘event’ such as retirement provides a focal point for gratitude – it seems a shame that many doctors receive a show of appreciation only at the end of their careers. One of the characteristics of the way we express gratitude, in Western societies at least, is that it often signifies the ‘closure’ of a particular transaction. (The word ‘transaction’ here seems freighted with economic meaning, rather unfortunately, but the rhetoric of gratitude is saturated with economic metaphors.) This closing shapes the framing of the act of gratitude as a ‘reward’ for past service: in terminis res, as it were, rather than in medias res.