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This film was developed for health services to use as part of an experience-based co-design (EBCD) process. EBCD is a patient-centred quality improvement process, and if you are planning to implement it in your organisation we recommend you use the online EBCD toolkit to guide you. The Point of Care Foundation is also developing a learning programme on EBCD supported by NHS England. We anticipate that it could also be used as part of an experience-led commissioning process. The film is a ‘trigger’ film which is intended to get local people, patients, families and NHS staff talking together about how they can jointly improve people’s experience.If you plan to show this film, we suggest the person facilitating the session use the following introduction to set the scene.

This film was put together from analysis of a national sample of 40 people who have been in intensive care, and 38 family members and friends. Researchers at the University of Oxford collected interviews with people all round the country, many on video, some audio or written only. They present findings from these interviews on the patient information website healthtalk.org The interviews are not just about NHS care but also much wider experiences, for example their emotional reactions to being in intensive care, how it affected family members, the impact on work, and their recovery at home.

For this project, we looked again at the whole interview collections and this time pulled out specific themes around experiences of services and ‘touchpoints’ (points of contact with the NHS).

Obviously these are not people at your trust and everybody has a different experience, though some patterns do start to emerge from looking at many stories. Some of the things they say you may think aren’t relevant to this hospital or what happened to you. But our hope is that listening to them will help you reflect on your own memories and spark some ideas for what could be done differently here.

There may be some where people are sad or angry, because being in intensive care can be a distressing experience. You will hear some negative comments, because we can learn a lot from looking at when things went wrong and what could have been done to make that a better experience. Even when people are largely positive about the rest of their care, one damaging bad moment can colour the whole thing. But listen out for positive comments too, where people remember some small act of kindness or a particularly good moment that made all the difference to them.

Ethics
This study was approved by the National Research Ethics Committee North West, reference 11/NW/0653

HS&DR Funding Acknowledgement:
This project was funded by the National Institute for Health Research Health Services and Delivery Research Programme (project number 10/1009/14). A full report of the findings is available here

Department of Health Disclaimer:
The views and opinions expressed therein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the HS&DR Programme, NIHR, NHS or the Department of Health.

And thanks to all the patients, family members and friends who took part in the interviews