ABSTRACT
Patient feedback plays a vital role in the design and improvement of contemporary health care services, with the results of such exercises now routinely used to regulate standards and stimulate improvements in health care provision across the globe. In the UK, the National Health Service gathers a great deal of user feedback from its patients via online forms. This chapter is based on the analysis of a dataset of 29 million words of such feedback submitted between March 2013 to September 2015. We examine the extent to which gender plays a role in the ways that health care staff are evaluated by patients and discuss a methodological issue that arises in determining how to identify the gender of NHS workers. This issue is critically approached from several perspectives (e.g. by referring to demographic data we can find that 99% of midwives are female, or we can read concordance lines to manually identify the gender of the person being referred to). We then go on to examine how corpus-based techniques can be used to identify the extent of biased language around gender e.g. the male pronoun he collocates more frequently with the evaluative words dismissive, patronising, and courteous while she collocates more with horrible, unprofessional, unfriendly, lovely, attentive, supportive, and welcoming.
