Why Patient Feedback Matters: A Digital Approach to CQC Excellence
As Primary Care Managers, we wear many hats — from compliance to communications — and increasingly, we’re being asked to master the digital patient experience too! One key area where all these responsibilities converge is patient feedback.
At Perfect Your Practice, we work with GP practices across the UK to enhance their digital engagement — not just to meet NHS and CQC standards, but to actually exceed them. In this guest blog post for My Practice Manager, I want to explore why patient feedback matters more than ever, how your online presence plays a crucial role and how tools like the AI features in My Practice Manager can help you achieve all of this more efficiently.
The Regulatory Angle: Feedback as a Requirement, Not an Optional Extra
Both the Care Quality Commission (CQC) and NHS England emphasise gathering, reviewing, and acting on patient feedback. Under CQC’s Key Lines of Enquiry (KLOEs), practices are expected to demonstrate that they listen to patients and use feedback to drive improvements — and not just via a lonely dusty suggestion box in the waiting room!
Whether it’s through regular patient surveys, direct digital communications or the annual GP Survey, the message is clear: feedback must be active, inclusive, and visible in your decision-making processes.
But the reality is, managing this kind of feedback consistently — and meaningfully — is a challenge, especially without the right systems in place. It is only natural to worry about a negative review, but do we spend the same amount of time praising a positive review? As Primary Care Managers, our role should be to celebrate the positive reviews just as much as we investigate the negative ones.
The Digital Shift: Feedback Lives Online Now
Gone are the days when patient feedback only came via the now outdated Friends and Family Tests or hand-written notes. Today, feedback is increasingly gathered (and published) online through your NHS profile, Google reviews, Facebook comments, and other digital channels.
Your website and social media are now key platforms for collecting feedback anddemonstrating how you respond to it. A well-maintained site with a visible feedback mechanism, patient satisfaction stats, or testimonials can powerfully boost trust and transparency. Likewise, replying to reviews / feedback — even the critical ones — shows you’re engaged and responsive.
And let’s not forget: prospective patients and CQC inspectors DO look at this.
The Smart Way Forward: Let AI Do the Heavy Lifting
This is where the AI tools within My Practice Manager become game-changers.
These tools allow you to:
• Monitor online reviews from multiple platforms automatically
• Analyse feedback sentiment to spot themes or issues early
• Generate responses quickly using AI-assisted suggestions
• Track patient satisfaction trends over time
By integrating AI into your feedback processes, you're not only saving time — you're gaining deeper insights and creating a data-driven culture of improvement, which CQC inspectors love to see.
Learn More: The Art of Digital Patient Engagement
If this resonates with you and you’d like to build a structured, proactive approach to digital feedback and patient communications, our online course — The Art of Digital Patient Engagement — is explicitly designed for NHS GP practices like yours.
The course covers:
• Meeting NHS & CQC feedback standards
• Setting up effective website and social media digital touchpoints
• Leveraging digital tools (like My Practice Manager) to streamline feedback
• Creating an online patient experience that builds loyalty and trust
• Embracing feedback equally (including the positive comments!)
Whether you're starting from scratch or looking to refine what you already have, this course gives you the strategy, tools, and confidence to turn patient feedback into a real strength.
Final Thoughts
Patient feedback isn’t just about listening — it’s about leading. With the right digital systems and mindset, feedback can become a cornerstone of your quality improvement journey, not a tick-box exercise.
Thanks to platforms like My Practice Manager, gathering and acting on feedback has never been more achievable. Combine this with strategic training like our Art of Digital Patient Engagement course, and your practice can truly shine — online and off.
To find out more about Perfect Your Practices’ “The Art of Digital Patient Engagement” course, please go to www.PerfectYourPractices.co.uk.