Atrial fibrillation catalyst film

The development of this film was funded through The Experience Led Commissioning (ELC) Programme. It is a ‘trigger film’, intended to trigger a discussion between people, families, NHS staff and commissioners about how they can work together to improve health outcomes and people’s experience. The ELC Programme provides commissioning support to health and care commissioners in The NHS and beyond. ELC offers both outsourced commissioning support and an organisational development and coaching programme, including training and accreditation of ELC Practitioners and Facilitators so that commissioners can embed and adopt ELC as ‘the way we commission around here’.

We anticipate that the film could also be used as part of an  experience-based co-design (EBCD). EBCD is a patient-centred quality improvement process. If you are planning to implement it in your organisation, we recommend you use the online EBCD toolkit to guide you. The Point of Care Foundation is also developing a learning programme on EBCD supported by NHS England.

If you plan to show this film, hexi.ox.ac.uk suggest the person facilitating the session use the following introduction to set the scene.

This film was put together from analysis of a national sample of 40 people with atrial fibrillation. Researchers at the University of Oxford collected interviews with people all round the country, many on video, some audio or written only. They present findings from these interviews on the patient information website hexi.ox.ac.uk The interviews are not just about NHS care but also much wider experiences, for example their emotional reactions to the diagnosis, how the condition impacts on their lives, their thoughts about the future.

For this project, we looked at the whole interview collection and pulled out specific themes around experiences of services and ‘touchpoints’ where people come into contact with the NHS. 

Obviously these are not people from your area and everybody has a different experience, though some patterns do start to emerge from looking at many stories. Some of the things they say you may think aren't relevant to local services or what happened to you. But our hope is that listening to them will help you reflect on your own memories and spark some ideas for what could be done differently here. 

There may be some where people are sad or angry about what’s happened to them, because atrial fibrillation can be distressing. You will hear some negative comments, because we can learn a lot from looking at when things went wrong and what could have been done to make that a better experience. Even when patients are largely positive about the rest of their care, one damaging bad moment can colour the whole thing. But listen out for positive comments too, where people remember some small act of kindness or a particularly good moment that made all the difference to them. 

The interview study from which this film was made was funded by Georgina Craig Associates as part of the development of an ELC Stroke Prevention Programme. 

Our thanks to all the patients who took part in the interviews.