Theme Leads: Dr Gaby Judah and Professor Mary Wells
The behaviours of patients, clinicians, and the public have a significant impact on patient safety. Behavioural science can help modify patient/public and clinician behaviours, improving patient safety. User-centred design and co-production with patients, members of the public and staff helps create interventions and environments that have the highest chance of success. This theme designs, develops and trials interventions to encourage behaviours which optimises safety and minimises risk.
Our work
The focus of Theme One is reducing inequalities in access to healthcare, through meaningful involvement of patients and public partners with lived experience (particularly from under-served groups), healthcare professionals, and key stakeholders. We co-design and test interventions which support behaviours in patients and healthcare workers to promote safety and reduce harm.
We do this through two workstreams.
Workstream A (“Behaviour change for equitable engagement with healthcare”) focuses on patient behaviours, to encourage better and more equitable engagement with healthcare to prevent avoidable harm.
Our work on this stream includes:
- Interventions to trial a leaflet, targeted messaging and an animation promoting cancer screening uptake particularly in people from deprived areas or ethnic minority groups
- A tailored intervention to help patients take their statins as prescribed
- Working with people with periphereal arterial disease (PAD) to develop a intervention to support them to take their medications as prescribed
- Interventions to increase patient engagement and reduce variation in the uptake of virtual consultations
Workstream B (“Empowering patients and care teams to improve patient safety behaviours”) focuses on providing healthcare workers with the ability to provide safer care. This includes developing interventions to address language and communication barriers, and to better communicate the needs of higher risk groups for example people with mental illness, learning disability or dementia.
Our work on this stream includes:
- A project exploring whether video recordings of older patients with frailty can be acceptably captured during routine care to enable safer care delivery across care transitions
- Co-producing patient centred interventions to reduce patient harm associated with language barriers and ineffective communication during care delivery Northwest London