Autism catalyst film

This trigger film was developed for health services to use as part of an experience based co-design process (EBCD).  EBCD is a patient centred quality improvement process.  The film is intended to get local people, patients, families, and NHS staff talking together about how they can jointly improve people’s experience of health services.  You can find out more about this process and how to use trigger films by accessing this link to the EBCD toolkit.

This film draws from a collection of 37 interviews with adults on the autistic spectrum.  The interviews were conducted across the UK by the Health Experiences Research Group at the University of Oxford.  It includes people talking about life on the autistic spectrum, about being diagnosed, and about the types of support they have accessed, or would like to be offered.  

See the full studies.

If you plan to show this film, we 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 37 people talking about their experiences of autism in adulthood. 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 the impact that asthma has had on their family, work and social lives.
    
For this project, we looked again at the whole interview collection and this time pulled out specific themes around experiences of services and ‘touchpoints’ (points of contact with the NHS). 

Obviously these are not people from your local 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. 

As well as illustrating some particularly good aspects of care that made all the difference to people, the film also includes some more negative experiences. It’s important to remember that we can also learn a lot from looking at when things went wrong and what could have been done to make that a better experience. Even when people are largely positive about the rest of their care, one damaging bad moment can colour the whole thing. 

We would like to know more about how you used this, or other trigger films in the collection, and would be grateful if you would spend a few minutes completing the feedback form.  The link to this is on this page.  
This film was funded by the Economic and Research Council (ESRC) project grant ES/LO1338X/1. The original interview study on which it is based was funded by The Wellcome Trust project grant 080057/Z/06/Z. The lead researcher for the original study was Sara Ryan. Re-analysis of the interviews, and the development of this film was led by Susan Kirkpatrick.