Report by Natalie Jones, Clinical Academic Occupational Therapist and ARRS Project Manager Sheffield Place.
Background
Active involvement of service users in evaluation processes and engaging patients in service design have the potential to enhance care quality by incorporating feedback on processes, accessibility, and overall experience, thus shaping and improving future developments. This report seeks to explore the influence of the multi-professional workforce in primary care. Twenty participants were interviewed for this project to explore their interactions with the multi-professional workforce and how they perceive its impact.
This report summarises the main discoveries from this work and presents notable insights obtained from the narratives of patients and carers concerning their firsthand experiences of the multi-professional workforce.
Furthermore, it presents a framework for measuring impact and a logic model that provides insights into the inputs, activities, and anticipated outputs of multi-professional roles. Although this work only reflects on a small number of perspectives from patients and carers the lived experiences and personal views of participants are extremely powerful and demonstrate the value added by diversifying the workforce in primary care.
Findings
There were six types of interventions being deployed by the multi-professional workforce.
- Occupation focused
- Signposting
- Health Coaching
- Medical care
- Psychosocial interventions
- Cognitive strategies
Patients and carers were asked what they valued and appreciated most about the multi-professional workforce and six themes were identified. Whilst timely access to health and care professionals held significance, it was not the most commonly cited aspect of appreciation. Instead, the majority of the patients expressed appreciation and gratitude for the demeanour of the individual, their communication style or their professional competencies. The relationship between patients and healthcare professionals was highly valued for its quality, continuity of care and resulting outcomes. Above all the personalised approach and therapeutic relationship were deemed the most valued aspects of care.
The data from the interview showed that patients and carers experienced a range of benefits from working with the multiprofessional workforce. These were analysed thematically, and an impact framework was developed to deserve six key domains and the features of a holistic assessment. The report describes these key domains in detail and provides examples from the patient and carer stories to illustrate the impacts. This data has been used to develop a logic model to explain the mechanisms at work when the multi-professional workforce is deployed and the anticipated outcomes.