Experience in action: Moderating care in web-based patient feedback

- Feedback websites are popular devices for soliciting experience in the UK.
- Patient experience is not simply captured, but accomplished.
- Moderation requires ongoing respecification of audiences, objects, and identities.
- Postings become a focal point for ordering relations of accountability.
- Following postings across settings is a useful way of studying patient feedback.

What does it take to mobilise experiences of care and make them useful for improving services? This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork with a UK-based patient feedback website to develop a critical perspective on patient experience as a contingent accomplishment and a focal point for eliciting, provoking, and respecifying relations of accountability. Following a single posting from the moderation room back to the author and into the wards and offices of the hospital, I show how moderators, carers, and clinical staff respond to and act upon a seemingly stable experience. Drawing on recent work in science studies and ethnomethodology, I suggest that the work of 'capturing the patient experience' is not so much a matter of accurate reporting or incontestable opining, but an exercise in testing versions of reality through the ongoing respecification of objects, audiences, and identities. Attending to the mundane practices of moderating accounts of care highlights the work of ordering alongside technologies of evaluation - the largely invisible labour that sustains the possibility of public patient feedback in the first place.