Healthcare Sciences launches Impact and Engagement seminar series

Involving service users as co-designers of improved services and new medical technologies can lead to valuable innovations. Recent innovations have received increasing recognition because of their applicability and contribution to improved patient experience. Researchers with expertise in serviceuser involvement in palliative care, mental health and physiotherapy presented their experiences and research findings at the School of Healthcare Sciences’ first Impact and Engagement seminar on the 21^st of May.

Dr Patricia Grocott (Reader in Palliative Wound Care, King’s College London, Florence Nightingale Faculty  of Nursing and Midwifery,) has used these techniques over the last decade to improve wound care for people suffering from the genetic condition Epidermolysis Bullosa. In 2013 King’s won the outstanding impact research award at the Guardian University Awards for the Woundcare for Epidermolysis Bullosa (WEB) project, which she led. She presented the WEB project and demonstrated the progression form WEB to current work undertaken in collaboration with Dr Turgut Meydan (Reader in Electrical and Electronic Engineering, School of Engineering, Cardiff University) including the GLOVE (Generation and Evaluation of Hand Therapy Devices for Epidermolysis Bullosa) project. Together with users, clinicians, industry collaborators, they are developing a wound dressing glove and a 'splint glove', incorporating computer-knitted textiles with an engineered system of adjustable splints and electronic sensors. The splint glove will supersede the rather limited splint devices in current use. The Wolfson Centre for Magnetics (Cardiff University) is developing the sensor and actuation technologies for the glove to enable controlled splint action to supporting the hand.

Bethan Edwards (Service User Project Assistant) and Dr Ben Hannigan (Reader in Mental Health Nursing in the School of Healthcare Sciences, Cardiff University) presented their experiences of engaging service users as researchers in a research programme that aims to identify and describe factors associated with personalised, recovery-focused and collaborative care planning and care coordination in community mental health services. COCAPP included the development of initial ideas with members of City University London’s SUGAR group. Once funded, a project-specific Lived Experiences Advisory Group chaired by independent service user consultant Alison Faulkner was established. This has  contributed to all aspects of the project . People with lived experience were also directly employed as members of the research team and as generators of qualitative interview data. In their presentation Bethan and Ben discussed the organisational challenges faced and met, including those relating to recruitment, governance and payments and talked about preparations for (and the practice of) fieldwork.