Improving end-of-life care in hospital environments
Project aims:
I worked with the Helix team to support Imperial Hospital to understand what is working well and what could be improved around end-of-life care in hospital environments, specifically focusing on understanding the current experiences and needs from marginalised communities.
Our approach
We ran interviews and co-design workshops to understand current experiences and co-create future improvements. We worked with people with lived experience to help us shape this project and research in an accessible, inclusive and caring way.
We created an inclusive and caring research approach
We co-created the research approach and materials with a panel of people who had lived experience of someone close to them dying in an imperial hospital environment. This helped us to ensure that we were always being supportive, inclusive and accessible with our research approach.
We were flexible with research methods and channels and were led by what participants felt most comfortable with. We spoke with a wide range of people who has experience of someone they were close to dying in a hospital environment, we also spoke with a variety of hospital medical staff and with wider staff members like the chaplaincy team.
We ran co-design workshops to create future improvements
We learnt about what people felt could be improved and what staff felt could be improved, we then took these areas into a co-design phase. We ran workshops with staff and with people who had experience of someone they were close to dying in a hospital environment, we built on early ideas together and created early prototypes to help further refine potential improvements.
Outcomes and impact:
There have been multiple outcomes from this project as the learnings have been fed into multiple teams. One of the main improvements that this project has led to was the creation of an information pack for people that includes things like “What you might want to say or do when you are visiting someone who is dying”. This resource was co-designed with people who had experience of someone close to them dying in a hospital environment.
A big thanks to the Helix team and imperial team - It has been such a pleasure to work with you to co-create future service improvements together!
Client: Helix
Services: Service Design, User Research
Team: Charley Pothecary, Helix Team and Imperial team