Introduction

This introductory chapter sets the scene for the study at the heart of this book. The chapter begins by introducing and providing a brief history and state of the NHS, moving on to consider patient feedback, outlining its growing significance to the design and provision of health care services across the world. The chapter’s focus will then narrow to explore the role of patient feedback in England (where our data originates) more specifically. It will then discuss the ‘Beyond the Checkbox’ project and the research questions and aims that have motivated the analysis reported in this book, including the specific questions that it will aim to answer. The chapter will then adopt a more methodological focus, introducing the specialised 40-million-word corpus of patient feedback under examination, providing details regarding its structure and composition. Having acquainted readers with our data, we then introduce corpus linguistics as our primary methodological approach, outlining its usefulness for handling large amounts of health-related language data and its general suitability for meeting the aims of the research presented in this book. Within this part of the chapter we will also introduce the CQPweb tool and the specific corpus techniques used throughout the book. This initial chapter then concludes with an overview of the book’s structure, providing a brief chapter-by-chapter synopsis.