This film was developed for health services to use as part of an experience-based co-design (EBCD) process. EBCD is a patient-centred quality improvement process, and if you are planning to implement it in your organisation we recommend you use the online EBCD toolkit to guide you. The Point of Care Foundation is also developing a learning programme on EBCD supported by NHS England. We anticipate that it could also be used as part of an experience-led commissioning process. The film is a ‘trigger’ film which is intended to get local people, patients, families and NHS staff talking together about how they can jointly improve people’s experience. If you plan to show this film, we suggest the person facilitating the session use the following introduction to set the scene.This film was put together from analysis of 21 interviews with 24 people and family members who have been to the emergency department (A & E) by researchers in one NHS Foundation Trust. The interviews were collected as part of a local EBCD project, but everyone who took part gave consent for them to be shared with healthtalk.org for wider use. The interviews are not just about NHS care but also much wider experiences, for example their emotional reactions to being in the emergency department, how it affected family members, and their recovery.For this trigger film, the local trust team pulled out specific themes around experiences of services and ‘touchpoints’ (points of contact with the NHS).
Obviously these are not people at your trust and everybody has a different experience, though some patterns do start to emerge from looking at many stories. Some of the things they say you may think aren’t relevant to your local hospital or what happened to you. But our hope is that listening to them will help you reflect on your own memories and spark some ideas for what could be done differently.
There may be some where people are sad or angry, because being in emergency department can be a distressing experience. You will hear some negative comments, because we can learn a lot from looking at when things went wrong and what could have been done to make that a better experience. Even when people are largely positive about the rest of their care, one damaging bad moment can colour the whole thing. But listen out for positive comments too, where people remember some small act of kindness or a particularly good moment that made all the difference to them.
And thanks to all the patients, family members and friends who took part in the interviews
Ethics
This study was approved by the National Research Ethics Committee North West, reference 11/NW/0653
Funding Acknowledgement:
This project was funded by the Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust Innovation Fund and the Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust Urgent Care Research Fund and a research grant from the Royal College of Emergency Medicine.
