Tay Health Tech is aiming to transform community healthcare in Tayside, Scotland, and target health inequality by taking advanced medical health technologies into the local community and into patients’ homes.
The project, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, brings together universities, hospitals and civic organisations and has £2.5 million to invest in challenges around diagnosis, treatment, planning and care delivery.
The project has put patients and care providers front and centre of its efforts, through a series of workshops designed to formulate the challenges and a citizens’ assembly to guide the funded projects.
Workshop responses were refined into grand challenges
Amy Connelly, Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement Coordinator for Tay Health Tech, said:
I’m passionate about giving patients a voice and seeing that voice turned into research and used to develop a medical technology that will benefit them and lead to fairer care.
We wanted to know what they understood about medical technology, how open they were to using it, how equipped they were to use it, and what it could be used for.
Workshops were held in four locations:
- Dundee
- Coupar Angus
- Arbroath
- Perth
Each had a different theme and covered areas such as cancer, lung disease, diabetes and substance use. A fifth workshop invited social care workers.
Workshop participants in Arbroath share their experiences with barriers to care and offer ideas on how medical technology could help address these issues. Credit: Amy Connelly at Tay Health Tech
Four grand challenges
The workshops generated 600 responses. These were refined to 26 different themes that were further refined into four grand challenges:
- hospital at home
- rehabilitation and prehabilitation
- testing
- prevention and prognostics
Successful applicants from local universities will spend up to two years working on the projects. They can call on a citizens’ assembly drawn partly from those who took part in the workshops and they will be expected to build patient and public involvement into the work.
Research register helped search for participants
Tay Health Tech turned to the Scottish Health Research Register (SHARE) to help it find workshop participants. SHARE is a register of people interested in taking part in health research projects.
Nevertheless, it encountered challenges in attracting a diverse age range to the workshops, as participants tended to be older or retired.
The responses were adequate to generate the grand challenges, and the project is now working to build a citizens’ assembly that reflects a broader age range.
Early planning is key to success
Amy added:
We had to recruit people very quickly due to constraints of time.
If I was advising anyone starting out with patient and public involvement, I’d say early planning is key. You must sort out things such as ethical approvals early on.
You need to think about involving groups that could help you. For example, we could have got better representation on substance use if we’d had time to ask some charities for help.
We couldn’t have done what we did without the help of SHARE.
Tay Health Tech involves:
- the University of Dundee
- Heriot-Watt University
- University of Glasgow
- University of St Andrews
- Edinburgh Napier University
- NHS Tayside
- Scottish Enterprise
- InnoScot Health
- Dundee City Council
- Dundee and Angus College
- SHARE
- BioDundee
- Angus Council
Top image: Participants at Couper Angus participating in the Tay Health Tech workshops on healthcare challenges faced by local communities. Credit: Amy Connelly at Tay Health Tech