guest post by Lydia Wysocki, Janice McLaughlin, and Heather Wilson
We’re a team of social science researchers (JMcL and LW) and comics creators (HW and LW) who have previously worked with clinical staff to make patient information materials for use in specific clinical contexts (see My MRI!). As a legacy of that work, we wanted to use those experiences to help more people get started with their own creative approaches to patient information. This blog post shares our set of new free resources made with the Great North Children’s Hospital (Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Trust), designed to jumpstart creative approaches to patient information.
Our experience of working with hospitals has been that colleagues in clinical departments and in support services are excited about ways to improve their patient information materials, but not always sure how to get started. Staff have no shortage of strong ideas, but to make those ideas happen they need to find ways through project planning and approvals processes, and find creative arts practitioners to work with.
These new free resources offer a quick-start guide and materials to help staff plan their own collaborative projects with artists – including comics creators and illustrators – to produce patient information materials for use as part of clinical encounters.
The resources are:
- Creative approaches to patient information: a quick-start guide (6-page PDF)
- Example of a project lifecycle
- detailed version (PDF version or Powerpoint version)
- simplified version for use as a presentation (PDF version or Powerpoint version)
- Project planning template (PDF version or Word version)
Click here to read and download these free resources from our project webpage.
Being upfront about the lifecycle of creative patient information projects can help staff plan what they need in order to put their innovative ideas into practice, including what level of input to ask for from patients, families, and clinical staff (all of whom are busy!). We have previously written about the importance of building relationships (see our Cost of Living blog post), and our resources can help get key stakeholders and decisionmakers on board right from the early stages of planning your project.
Good luck! Let us know how you get on using these resources to jumpstart creative approaches to patient information in your own clinical contexts.
Contact for queries: lydia.wysocki@ncl.ac.uk
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