GP-MATE - A co-production approach to improving primary care patient safety after older people are discharged from hospital

Problem

Hospital discharge is a risky time for older people, over 5 million patients aged ≥75 are discharged from English hospitals each year. Our previous primary care research shows that one in thirteen over 75’s are harmed as a result of how their post-discharge primary care is conducted (over 400,000 patients in England each year).

Approach

Older patients and their carers have a key role to play in preventing these harms in collaboration with their general practices. Over the next 4 years the NIHR funded General Practice Management After Transition Events (GP-MATE) study aims to address the lack of material to help primary care professionals help older patients after discharge. We are taking a co-produced approach with patients and primary care professionals to creating a new communication tool for patients and an educational learning set for professionals. The study uses a method called ‘Experienced based co-design’ to enable patients to be heavily involved in creating the tool. In this method, a video of patient experiences, created specifically for the project, is used as an immersive visual experience to break down barriers between patients/carers and healthcare staff in order to trigger creative discussions. We will assemble a variety of possible templates for what our tool will look like based on available literature in order to kick-start these discussions. Three groups of patients and healthcare providers across the country will meet repeatedly to design the tool iteratively. In the third and fourth year we will pilot our tool locally in ten West Midlands practices to optimize its use in general practice.

Findings

This project is just beginning. Our content will focus on a description of our novel study methods and invite comment/discussion on these. SAPC member awareness of the research being conducted and the potential to develop wider project collaborations in co-production is our target for this presentation.By June we will be able to present early results from our unique analyses of practices' systems for post-discharge care and early results from patient experiences of discharge interviews which will be used to create out 'trigger film'. Possible tool templates which we will take to our co-production teams will be presented.

Consequences

Patients/carers have an important role to play in preventing errors and harms which occur after discharge from hospital. We want to help empower older patients (and their carers) to take an active role in their general practice care after coming home from hospital and anticipate that the tool we will create will help them to do this. We also want to make sure that our tool is feasible for use in routine general practice care and that it addresses the needs of practice staff as well as those of patients and carers.