11. Running the joint patient/ service user -staff event
This event brings together the service users and staff to hear each other’s perspectives on the service and identify the key priorities to tackle together to make improvements.
By the end of the event you should have chosen three or four areas to work on and found volunteers to join the co-design groups on these topics.
For women these were: antenatal information; care processes and routines; the journey to theatre; and the theatre environment.
For staff these were: the care process; perspectives (roles); the environment; and collaboration (working together).
The New Beginnings project had some issues that came up for both staff and women – watch this pair of films for example
Others may have been a surprise for the staff, for example seeing the impact seemingly innocuous clinical processes had on the mothers. One mother (whose baby was being checked over just out of sight) described how, “no-one was saying anything. It was probably only one or two minutes, but for those few minutes, I thought he’d died.”
Women and staff agreed (through voting) on three or four areas to work on making improvements, and volunteered to join a co-design group to take them forward.
Events are usually held in person but during the Covid pandemic we adapted our events to go online. You can read about the DaVinci project here https://www.thisinstitute.cam.ac.uk/research-projects/davinci/. In this study we created ‘personas’ to encourage discussion, which we created by pulling together what we heard in interviews to make a composite experience.