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 draws upon material from of a number of studies featuring people talking about their experiences of parenthood.    Researchers at the University of Oxford collected interviews with people all round the country, many on video, some audio or written only. They present findings from these interviews on the patient information website healthtalk.org.   For this project we looked at young people’s experiences from several interview collections ; pregnancy; antenatal screening, screening for sickle cell and beta thalassemia, breastfeeding, making decisions about birth after caesarean, and young people and sexual health.   The full studies can be viewed on the healthtalk website, but for this project we looked specifically for themes around experiences of services and ‘touchpoints’ (points of contact with the NHS).  The original interviews are not just about NHS care but also much wider experiences.

Obviously these are not people from your local area 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 this 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 here.

There may be some clips where people are unhappy with things that happened to them.  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 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.

This trigger film was made with funding from the NHS National Institute for Health Research Health Services and Delivery Research (HS&DR) Programme, as part of research project 10/1009/14.
The views and opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the NHS, the NIHR, or the Department of Health.

The studies this film draws on were supported by:
Department of Health
UK National Screening Committee
Centre for Qualitative Research, Bournemouth University
Institute of Health & Community Studies, WOMen, Babies & their families (WOMB) Programmatic Research Group
Bristol University
BUPA foundation
Dundee University
Hulme University Fund, Oxford
NHS National Screening Programme for Sickle Cell and Thalassemia

Thank you to all the participants.