Bringing people who use health and care services together with clinicians – Healthwatch Essex

It’s a simple and effective idea, but not something that is always possible. Bringing clinicians face to face with people that use health and care services, to bring their experiences to life, can have a real impact on service improvements and be a key foundation for co-design and co-production.

I spoke with Renee Robey at Healthwatch Essex about how they went about it.

Healthwatch Essex run the Collaborate Essex Disability and Carers Forum in partnership with Essex County Council, made up of people with physical, and/or sensory disabilities and autism, as well as carer representatives. The forum meets quarterly and one of the meetings was used to invite representatives from the local health trusts to talk with them about their experiences.

The representative from the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Harlow shared their ‘In Your Shoes’ model, which they use to understand and share patient journeys and experiences. After months of planning, an event took place using the ‘In Your Shoes’ methodology that brought forum members, mental health ambassadors and a range of clinicians from the Princess Alexandra together at Kao Park in Harlow on 21st June. Forum members were involved in the planning and how they would work with the clinicians.

The session lasted four hours and paired each of the forum members or mental health ambassadors with a clinician. Clinicians were asked to use active listening, only asking questions to clarify and not to try to explain or justify why an experience happened. They were happy to work in this way. The day was broken up into sessions of  one to one conversations and then coming back together as a group to share feedback. At the end of the day there was an opportunity for networking and talking to anyone you wanted to about what had been discussed.

The aims of the day were to inform the design of the new hospital IT system and how it can support staff to ensure procedures learn from the experiences, however it was clear those aims needed to expand and some forum members have already discussed visiting the hospital to review access arrangements.

The clinicians valued hearing the experiences, even though some were very difficult to hear, such as someone who had not returned to hospital for forty years because of a traumatic experience when she had last been there. It was helpful for them to hear what people with mental ill health found triggering about being in hospital.

The clinicians and participants agreed a set of recommendations and an action plan. Because the forum meets regularly, there is resource and structure to monitor how the action plan is progressing. There are also discussions about using the model with other health and social care organisations in Essex.

Co-design and co-production are the buzzwords at the moment, but events like this provide a valuable foundation of relationships on which to build future co-production initiatives, and show the value of nurturing Healthwatch relationships with system partners.

Thanks to Renee for taking the time to speak to me.