We held our seventh co-creation workshop on 8 November 2023 with a small group consisting of parents and patient group representatives, a researcher and a policy maker. As this session was all about ideation, we started with some quick games to get us into the mindset.
Ideation sessions have two phases: divergence and convergence. In a divergence session, the goal is for the group to come up with lots of ideas – the more the merrier – without worrying about the practicality of implementing them in the real world. The next step is a process of convergence – this is where participants group the ideas by theme, look for ways to convert ‘crazy’ ideas into useful ones, and choose the most useful ideas and build solutions for them.
In this workshop we reviewed one of the top five issues which arose from parent interviews – that parents going into a clinical trial don’t know what’s ahead and need a clear roadmap to understand how a trial works, the steps and tasks it entails, and so on.
To tackle this issue, the participants were asked to address two questions:
- What steps do parents need to know?
- If the roadmap were a game, how would you create it?
We used Padlet to do this brainstorming and then began to work on the steps of the roadmap, complemented by lively discussion driven by parents who have experience of the NICU and of clinical trials. One of the most important points to arise was that it is fundamental to check in on parents at every step of the journey, recognising that they are an active member of the care team and that their mental health also needs to be protected.
In Workshop 8 on Thursday 30 November we will continue to build this roadmap. If you’d like to join a PREMSTEM co-creation workshop for the first time, you can sign up via Eventbrite.
