Primary care discovery

In causing many of us to have to interact with our GPs remotely, the COVID-19 pandemic only made the need for good digital healthcare services more pressing.

By thoroughly understanding the needs of patients and healthcare providers, NHS Wales would be able to make sound decisions when developing such services for the public.

Who was involved?

Digital Services for Patients and the Public was the project sponsor.

Users and providers of patient-facing digital systems, including My Health Online, as well as GPs and GP practice nurses, managers and administration staff were all involved in the research.

What did CDPS do?

‘Discovery’ is the first, research phase of Agile service design, the incremental approach to building services that CDPS champions. Discovery involves understanding the needs of users of a potential service – an essential step before considering ways to meet those needs.

As part of this discovery, CDPS interviewed the users and providers mentioned above about their:

previous primary care experiences
perceptions of primary care
attitudes towards technology

These conversations yielded rich insights into what’s important to people receiving and providing primary care in Wales. Those insights helped us to build a picture of the wider Welsh primary care landscape, factoring in policy intent and other stakeholder perspectives such as those of government agencies beyond healthcare.

That will be the context within which new patient-facing digital services will sit. At the end of discovery, we were able to make informed recommendations – balancing user needs, broader stakeholder interests and government strategy – about the shape those future services might take.