Thursday 22 May 2025 | 13:15-14:30

Format: Workshop

Stream: People

Content filters: n/a

Chair: Bob Klaber Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust; England

PART ONE: Co-production is key to achieving a better community. Can reaching, teaching and engaging families really be as easy as ABC?

A child’s health is dependent on their parents’ ability to provide a healthy start. The choices parents make are impacted by their knowledge and experience but strongly influenced by fear, deprivation, isolation and access. What if we could target and teach new parents what they needed to know? What would their engagement and co-production look like? What if we could connect them and build up support community networks? Living and working in a deprived area of North London, we saw the opportunity as health professionals to co-produce a parent education and peer support programme. The initiative, ABC Parents, aims to Achieve a Better Community exemplifying patient involvement, lived experience, co production and partnership working centred around reducing health inequalities. We will take delegates on a compelling journey of true collaboration. We will challenge them to review if, when and why they should have patient involvement and commit to greater collaborative working.

In this session, participants will: 

• Appreciate the simplicity of engaging local parents and working together to improve parent education, peer support and access to resources. 


• Explore meaningful practical partnerships they can develop to better address the challenges their families encounter. 


• Commit to at least one improvement to their coproduction and partnership working.

Akudo Okereafor ABC Parents, North Middlesex University; England

Lucy Robin Child Health Community Champions Lead, ABC Parents; England

 

PART TWO: Engage to elevate: designing research with patients and care partners to improve our understanding of safety

Engagement of patients and care partners is endorsed by the World Health Organization as an important strategy for improving healthcare safety. Due to their constant presence during the healthcare journey, patients and care partners have unique insights that can be leveraged to better understand safety gaps and identify improvement opportunities. Despite being a source of experiential knowledge and experts in their care, patients and their care partners are not often included in improvement efforts and patient safety research. In this session, we use the work from two studies to illuminate how to design research to learn from the patients’ and care partners’ experiences to elevate our understanding of patient safety. We also advocate for greater attention to patient and care partner engagement in research. Further, we provide examples that improvements in healthcare cannot be accomplished without patients and care partners in all aspects of the research or improvement process.

In this session, participants will:

• Explain current literature about patient and care partner engagement in patient safety.


• Describe strategies to engage patients and care partners when designing improvements and/or research.


• Apply the lessons from the methods of the two presented studies to one’s own context

 

Laura Pozzobon University Health Network; Canada

Melissa Sheldrick Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP); Canada