Experience Based Co-Design training for staff at the KeepingWell NCL Hub
10 August 2023 Case study
Originally featured in our Impact Report 2022
Topics and programmes
KeepingWell North Central London (NCL) Hub is a staff mental health and wellbeing initiative that seeks to connect and support the North Central London health and social care workforce. They provide support to all health and social care staff who live and/or work in Camden, Islington, Barnet, Enfield and Haringey.
Experience Based Co-Design (EBCD) training was commissioned by KeepingWell NCL in 2022 to offer a more structured, proactive method for improvement, moving away from reactive approaches. The one-day face-to-face training course delivered by the Point of Care Foundation took 17 participants through the stages of the EBCD method.
There were some powerful reflections and insights throughout the day.
One participant said:
I just wanted to thank you for yesterday’s training which has left me, and I think the team, energised, and engaged. It was a really great introduction to the wonders of EBCD and how it can change the world (I feel the same about Action Learning). We will start small and build up.”
How the training has been used
One of the themes that came up during the training was about the difficulties faced by staff returning to work with Long Covid. As a Hub, we wanted to carry out some work in this area but we were not sure what would be most helpful for our staff . It was felt that this would be a good opportunity to use some of the skills we had learnt to co-design an
approach.
We initially set up two focus groups: one with practitioners with lived experience of Long Covid, the other with practitioners who deliver services and support to people living with Long Covid. We recorded these sessions and permission was sought to use clips to put together a touchpoint fi lm. We extracted themes from the recorded data. The groups were then brought together in another follow up session where we shared the film.
All group members experienced this fi lm as enormously powerful. Several said that they had never seen a video which they related to so closely. Group members felt passionate that the video should be further developed and promoted as a resource for KeepingWell NCL Hub staff to enhance understanding of how to support people with Long Covid in the workplace. The group also decided that we should co-deliver a webinar for staff with Long Covid and their colleagues.
Hub staff reflections
Having now used this approach to plan service delivery, it is difficult to think of any other process that would have been as effective. We have reflected that, although we thought we were aware of the issues around Long Covid, this process showed us how little we knew and understood.
This has been an incredibly satisfying process and one which our focus group members have also valued greatly. Getting a group of stakeholders together to share and create has been an experience none of us will forget and has allowed us to develop resources that don’t exist already and have the potential to make a real difference.