10. Running the patient / service user feedback event
This event marks the point at which the women who had participated in the project came together for the first time. They watched the edited film and discussed what they thought were the key priorities for service improvement that they could then take to the joint event where staff and patients come together to co-design improvements.
Watch Emma and Andrew talk about how they prepared for the events:
Emotional mapping is a good exercise to do at the service user event (use the guide to facilitating the emotional mapping exercise).
At the women’s event they used an emotional mapping exercise to describe how they felt about being in theatre. This could then be compared with the staff’s account of the Caesarean timeline slide below.
The women described eloquently how finding themselves in theatre often came as a shock, and they found they were in a “surgical” experience rather than a “maternity” experience.
These are examples of the film the women watched together at the event. Content warning – some of the women are talking about highly emotional experiences.
https://vimeo.com/816847198
At their event, women chose a number of areas to focus on to make improvements, and prepared these to take to the joint event with staff.
Alternative approaches
Events are usually held in person but during the Covid pandemic we adapted our events to go online. You can read about the DaVinci project here https://www.thisinstitute.cam.ac.uk/research-projects/davinci/. In this study we created ‘personas’ to encourage discussion, which we created by pulling together what we heard in interviews to make a composite experience. Alice’s story is an example.
https://vimeo.com/818436019