Empowering People to Help Speak Up about Safety (EPHESUS) in Primary Care

‘Multimorbidity’ is the term used when patients have two or more long-term conditions at the same time. Patients in the NHS increasingly experience multimorbidity, which can mean their conditions are more difficult to manage. This is because the care provided often focuses on single conditions, and it’s more challenging to manage several conditions at the same time, especially if those conditions require different medications or different specialists to be involved. A particular concern is whether the safety of those patients is compromised, for example if taking multiple drugs leads to an unexpected reaction. We spoke to patients with multimorbidity about what ‘safety’ means to them, and they highlighted communication, trust, accessibility and continuity of care (seeing the same professional) as important issues.

In the EPHESUS study, we want to design new ways of supporting people with multimorbidity, and their health professionals, to make sure their care is safe. We have lots of evidence from different studies that patients can help us to do this, but we want to make sure that the new ideas we propose are focused on the aspects of safety that patients themselves find most important, and are things that patients would be happy to use. To do this, we will conduct co-design workshops with both staff and patients using design materials called ‘personas’ and ‘scenarios’ that will help us focus on the problems that are most important to patients. We will also use a method called ‘Accelerated Experience Based Co-Design’ (AEBCD), which involves showing videos of real patients talking about the issues that matter to them. Using these together with the workshops, we will try to identify new healthcare solutions to provide better and safer care for patients with multimorbidity.