Project Title: GP Management After Transition Events (GP-MATE)

Start date: April 2021

Background: Being discharged from hospital is known to be a risky part of a patient’s journey, particularly for older people because they may have more complex health needs/ medications. For each of the 5.2 million patients aged 75 or older admitted to hospital in England in 2018-19, a letter was sent from the hospital to their GP practice when they left hospital. There are problems with how many of these letters are managed in general practice, and one in thirteen older patients experience harm as a result (over 400,000 patients in England each year). Harms range from mild to severe but include; readmission to hospital, contribution to organ damage and even untimely death. Patients/carers have an important role to play in preventing these errors and harms. 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.

Design and Methods used: The study will take place across four years using a special 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. This will make us ready to implement the tool nationally in future research.

Interested in the study or would you like to help us develop this research?

Please email Dr Rachel Spencer at the University of Warwick: r.spencer.2@warwick.ac.uk