Patient partners were key to designing the timing and format of patient information, says Nicole.

Transcript

And we wanted to make sure that we conveyed that information to all potential surgical patients in a way that would make sense to them, like gave them the relevant information they needed to know, it could be easily understood. And we wanted to know when the right time, or how to give them this information was, and it became apparent to us that like we aren’t really familiar with being a surgical patient at the Ottawa Hospital, so it would be awesome if we could have people working on our team who have been through the process before to say like ‘hey this would be a good time to give us the information’, ‘this is how I would like to receive it’, and that kind of thing.     

So the two patient partners that we ended up working with, and who still work with us on all of our stuff now, helped us to identify, for example, when in the whole care pathway they should receive the information, and we decided it would be at their pre-operative assessment, before the surgery. And they helped us to design a communications campaign so to pair all the sort of themes and messages that came from our interviews, put them in a relatable sort of way that anyone could understand, pair them with relatable images and sort of the format of how stuff would look. So we designed a poster and a brochure, an information letter and all sorts of different materials that could be made available to surgical patients at their visit and in the clinics at each campus of the hospital. And I think that without our patient partners, I don’t think we would have done as good of a job at that. And we’ve actually had like 100% participation by all the patients who have been scheduled for surgery in the Black box room; no-one has said no, I don’t want to be recorded. And I think that success is because we went about this process with patients partnering with our team.

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