Generating Insights
By Santini Basra, Freyja Harris, Catherine Montgomery, Corrienne McCulloch, Annemarie Docherty
This is the fourth post in our Critical Care Futures series. If you need to catch up, head back to the first post where we give a little context on this project, the second post where we talk about what the process of co-designing the cultural probes looked like or the third post where we talk about what happened when the cultural probes were sent out to the project participants.
This blog covers what we did with the completed cultural probes which were returned to us, and how they were turned into principles about the future of research in a critical care setting. Additionally, you can download the slides we used to debrief those who completed the probes during a workshop, as well as a selection of the completed probes.
Introduction
After giving the participants a few weeks to complete the activities, we started to look forward to the envelopes of completed probes arriving back to us in the post. As we started opening and reviewing these responses, we were struck by the level of detail, and wide spectrum of meaning that was contained in each response. In some cases, responses were quite literal and easy for us to interpret, but others were metaphorical, or packed with personal meaning and challenging for us to unpack.
Debriefing Participants
In order to better understand the nuances of the probes, we arranged a debrief with participants to give them an opportunity to talk us through their responses and elaborate on any key themes. While cultural probes would typically be debriefed through one-on-one calls, we were keen to use this as an opportunity to bring together our participant groups (survivors, relatives, researchers, clinicians, and ethics committee members) who don’t typically meet outside of a clinical setting, and create space for unexpected interactions and conversations. In order to do this, we organised a debrief workshop, in which participants could compare responses and sensemake together. We also had an ambition to work with participants to collectively shape a set of principles for the future of research in critical care, and the workshop setting offered a good opportunity to produce a draft version of these which could be synthesised later.
The workshop was attended by 15 people, including patients, family members, ethics committee members, clinicians and researchers, who were divided into four groups. Each group was facilitated by a member of the project team, and those who co-designed the probes also attended to support discussions. We also ensured there was a mix of survivors, relatives, researchers, clinicians, and ethics committee members at each table to encourage healthy debate.
During the two-hour workshop, the groups covered discussions on topics such as what values should underpin the approach to research in critical care, how research can support a caring environment in critical care, how patients’ data should be accessed and protected, and how consent should be obtained for research in critical care. Each discussion concluded with a quick exercise to propose principles summarising the group’s discussion for the future of research in critical care.
At the end of the workshop, we arranged the suggested principles into groups and themes. We all — project team members, co-designers and probe participants — reflected on them and voted on the groups we felt most strongly about.
For those who were unable to attend the workshop, a debrief call was arranged that mirrored the questions asked to the group as a whole.
Synthesis
After digitising the workshop post-it notes and clusters of draft principles, the project team met to synthesise the principles further. We further discussed and refined these to ensure they each made a distinct point and reflected on the breadth of discussions covered in the debrief and across probe responses. This involved reviewing probe responses and affinity mapping specific responses using the draft principles as a guide. The final principles are as follows:
Sharing tools from our process
The plan we developed to support the debrief workshop is available here to download for free, under a creative commons license.
A selection of completed probes is also available to download here.
About ‘Exploring Futures for Critical Care Research’
‘Exploring Futures for Critical Care Research’ is funded by a Scottish Public Engagement Network (ScotPEN) Wellcome Engagement Award. The project is a collaboration between clinicians, social scientists and designers, working with ICU survivors and research governance staff to co-design cultural probes for public engagement. In addition to catalysing dialogue, the project aims to produce a set of future principles for person-centred approaches to data use and consent in ICU, as well as a public-facing installation about the future of ICU research.
