Consulting by phone, video or in person? Helping NHS patients and practices organise and navigate GP consultations in primary care

We are working with our colleagues at Oxford‘s Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Science in collaboration with the Centre for Primary Care at Queen Mary University of London and the University of Manchester to support an 18 month research project that aims to help patients and practices organise and navigate consultations in primary care.

Currently, most GP practices deliver a mix of in person and remote appointments such as video and telephone. The Modcons Study aims to understand decisions about who gets what kind of care, and ultimately to help patients make sense of this as they navigate the system.

We will define final outputs through a co-design process. We also aim to influence policy and practice while supporting the needs of practice teams and those who struggle to get the primary care and kind of support that they need.

We’ll be actively supporting the researchers as they investigate the nature of modern primary practice, helping to co-design ‘practice maps’ and ‘healthcare journeys’ so they can engage with stakeholders and collect detailed information in a structured way. We’ll use this research to create a ‘primary care service blueprint’ that shows a range of ‘patient and practice experiences’ mapped against health needs, practice teams and key stages in the journey, together with where, when and how these interactions and decisions are made.

We’ll support project definition by helping to capture ‘journey and life’ stories from both practitioners and patients. We’ll create process maps that highlight key opportunities and challenges and visualise stories through ‘simple storyboards’. This will include ‘visual responses to key narratives’ that take into account the characters, plots and audiences identified through research. 

Our aim is to clarify complex information and agree a ‘detailed brief for web-based content and animation’.

We’ll be running co-design workshops with patients and practitioners where we present sketch designs for staff and patient ‘navigation’ resources and use these to help the wider health community get the most from a new patient and community centred approach to ‘multi-modal’ primary healthcare in the 2020s.

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