To find just the right stories on Care Opinion, you often have to find just the right service(s) first.
You can think of finding the right service(s) as a two stage process.
1: Find the right organisation or location
The way to start a search is just to start typing in the site search box. If you know the name of the organisation or location (such as a hospital or care home), there's a good chance you'll find it straight away.
If you are adding a service to an existing search, type the organisation or location name into the "add a search term" box.
2: Refine your search further if you need to
Once you have found roughly the service you want, you can refine it further.
For example, you may have added a hospital to your search, but you want to filter your search to just one or two services within the hospital.
To do this, follow the steps below.
Open the Change Service dialog
To refine a specific service in your search, click on the three dots (...) next to the service you want to refine. You can see this in the screenshot below.
This opens the Change Service dialog.
How the Change Service dialog looks
When you open the Change Service dialog, it looks like this:
At the top of the dialog you can see the name of the service you are changing.
In the middle, you can see other services within the same organisation which you could use in your search instead.
At the bottom (the empty box) you add the services you want to filter on instead.
How to find and add a service in this dialog
Suppose that you want to filter down your search from "Surrey and Sussex Healthcare" to the Maternity service within Crawley Hospital, which is provided by this organisation.
First you would click on "Crawley Hospital" in the dialog. This will enable you to see the services within the hospital.
Then you would add the Maternity service, by clicking the green "+" (add button).
Here's the result:
When you click "Update my search", the service you started with (Surrey and Sussex Healthcare) will be replaced by the service (or services) you added to the lower box - in this case, Maternity at Crawley Hospital.
The final search result looks like this:
If you wanted, you could change the search again by clicking on the three dots (...).
Note that if you also have other filters as part of your search, they are not changed by refining a service. They will remain as part of your search, after you have finished refining the service you began with.
Further help
There is also a blog post about service selection on the Care Opinion Tech Blog.