Key Competence: Health
Case Study: Impact of The Life Channel on Patients of NHS Greenwich
NHS Greenwich engaged ROI Team as part of their quest to demonstrate effective use of funds, and in particular to demonstrate their effective communication with the very wide spread of cultures, faiths, and languages found in the borough.
The project was part of Greenwich’s journey towards World Class Commissioning status.
The vehicle chosen for evaluation of effective communication was The Life Channel, the out-of-home tv service delivered into more than 1,000 GP surgeries across the UK, which plays out to patients in some scores of surgeries in the NHS Greenwich area.
Objectives
Our objective was to evaluate :
- Effectiveness of The Life Channel as a communication channel
- Recall of The Life Channel and specific programmes
- Patients’ intention to act or to change behaviour after seeing TLC programmes
- Impact of The Life Channel on patient perceptions of NHS Greenwich
- Patient confidence in information received via an in-surgery TV channel.
Approach
Challenges associated with this project included the need to gather information in the sensitive environment of a GP surgery; and to gather feedback from a large proportion of people who lack confidence in English language.
ROI Team used a self-complete questionnaire method, a technique which has proved to be effective in the sensitive environment of a GP surgery.
ROI Team worked to secure the co-operation of surgery receptionists to encourage patients to complete and return questionnaires, and to offer a phone-delivered translation service to any patient unwilling for language reasons.
Findings
ROI Team analysed actual and predicted behaviour of viewers exposed to The Life Channel, against a benchmark of patients not exposed. The harvest of 900 completed questionnaires from 16 surgeries allowed for drill down into responses by wealthier/ less wealthy patients; frequent/infrequent surgery visitors; older/younger patients; patients with/without children; as well as by usual age, demographic, and lifestyle types.
