The Care Opinion Canada website managed by Imagine Citizens Network is a platform for public feedback about health and social care. It is not a formal complaint process, nor part of a complaint process.
We do publish feedback about the experience of making complaints in health and social care. Here are some things you might want to think about when deciding whether to post feedback here, before, during or after a complaint process.
If you are planning to make a complaint, or have an ongoing complaint, about your care
If you are planning to make a complaint, or have already made a complaint, to a health or care service, you can still share a story about that experience (about the care, or about the complaint process itself) on the Care Opinion Canada website.
- When you post on the Care Opinion Canada website, you are likely to be identifiable to the staff who are looking into your complaint.
- You should think carefully about whether a public story on the Care Opinion Canada website might affect how complaint handlers and other staff feel about your complaint, or how they respond to it.
To avoid having two different communications in progress with the same organisation at the same time (a formal complaint and informal online feedback), it might be wise to wait until your complaint process is completed. Then you can decide whether you want to share feedback about your care, or the complaint process, on the Care Opinion Canada website.
If you want to go ahead, let our moderator know. Your story will then be moderated in line with our standard process.
If a complaint about your care is completed
If your complaint process is completed, sharing your experience on the Care Opinion Canada website will normally not cause you a problem.
Posting on the Care Opinion Canada website is not a way to reopen your complaint, or reach a different complaint outcome.
If you have been unhappy with the complaint process, you may be planning to escalate your case to a health service ombudsman. If so, you should check whether posting on the Care Opinion Canada website (or receiving a response from the care provider on the Care Opinion Canada website) could cause a delay to the ombudsman accepting your case.
If you want to go ahead, let our moderator know. Your story will then be moderated in line with our standard process.
There is a health service ombudsman in Alberta:
https://www.ombudsman.ab.ca/patient-concerns-resolution-process/
Office of the Alberta Health Advocates:
https://www.alberta.ca/office-of-alberta-health-advocates
How is posting on the Care Opinion Canada website different to making a formal complaint?
The table below summarises some of the differences between Care Opinion Canada and making a formal complaint.
| Care Opinion Canada website | Formal complaint |
| Informal and online | Formal and usually on paper |
| Outside the organisation | Inside the organisation |
| You remain anonymous | You do not remain anonymous |
| Public: everyone can read it | Private: only you and the organisation can see it |
| You may not get any response | You should always get a response |
| Multiple organisations may respond | A single organisation responds |
| Story/response statistics are not monitored | Complaint statistics are monitored nationally |
| No power to force specific outcomes | May result in a clear action plan |
| Focus on learning and improvement | Focus on fault and accountability |
How does the Care Opinion Canada program staff moderate a story about a formal complaint?
The Care Opinion Canada program staff moderates stories about the experience of complaint just like other stories, in line with our moderation policy and values.
Where it is clear that a formal complaint is planned or is ongoing, we pause moderation and ask the author to consider the issues on this page. If the author confirms they wish to go ahead, we resume moderation of the story.
Why does the Care Opinion Canada program have this policy?
The mission of the Care Opinion Canada program is for “people to be able to share their experiences of health and care in ways which are safe, simple, and lead to learning and change”. Experiences of health and care may include a wide range of experiences, such as clinical, administrative or relational experiences, and may also include the experience of a formal complaint process.
In principle, we believe that the Care Opinion Canada website should publish both experiences of care which lead to complaints, and experiences of the complaints process itself. We believe wider public benefits follow from this policy.