Weeknotes 2: All about East London

29 March 2019, written by Emma Diamond, User Researcher, FutureGov

Last week we launched our patient and staff engagement in the first of our three locations — East London, with fantastic support from leaders at Tower Hamlets CCG and North East London STP who introduced us to a wide range of stakeholders locally.

Our first week involved spending time in a variety of UEC settings and in people’s homes, engaging with a mixture of staff and patient groups. We’ve been organising our engagement into several streams, each lead by a blended NHS Digital and FutureGov multi-disciplinary team:

Contextual engagement

This means in-situ, ‘live’ conversations with both patients and staff.

Community settings

Such as GP practices (OOO) and extended hours hubs and pharmacists
Emily and Emma have been cycling around East London dropping into GP practices and pharmacies, developing relationships with practice managers and pharmacists to return and conduct contextual interviews with both staff and patients. So far met with a lot of support and willingness to help, despite the time pressures on services.

Emergency departments

Behind the scenes Rich and the rest of the team have been busy warming up our contacts to identify and engage ED and UCC/UTC departments where we might conduct our contextual work shadowing staff and speaking to patients. This has now born fruit and we started engagement in the Royal London last Friday, followed by Homerton on Tuesday. We are also hoping to visit some of the urgent care centres in East London — if you can help with introductions there please get in touch.

111 / 999 call listening

To complement the community-facing work, Lingjing has been spending time at the London Ambulance Service (LAS), exploring this early stage of the triaging process. We will be doing more of this with North East Ambulance (NEAS) and Yorkshire Ambulance (YAS) in a few weeks.

Reflective engagement

This means taking an ethnographic and reflective approach to interviewing in people’s homes.

Alongside contextual engagement, we have been conducting in-depth interviews with people from our four priority patient groups who have recently experienced an urgent care episode. We have done eight so far, uncovering so much around decision making and tensions in their patient journeys from beginning to end across UEC settings — we’ll be sharing some of these stories in our upcoming show and tell!

What’s next

While our engagement in our first location (East London) continues in earnest, we shared a sneak peek into some early learnings in our first show and tell. At the time of this post, we have completed research and synthesis in East London and will shortly be moving into engagement in Somerset.

Get in touch with Sophie Dennis or Joanna Choukeir if you’d like to chat through any of the work.