Interviews

• Empowering the patients • Decentralised decision-making process. We listed down opportunities from the practitioner’s point of view because we did not have access to interview the patients and carers because of the NDA with the NHS. Based on the above-listed opportunities, we listed down our hypothesis. We categorised it based on: Desensitised practitioners: The doctor may feel normal about the patient’s pain, so the patient might think doctors lack sympathy. Boundaries: Patients might feel a lack of interaction with the health staff regularly.

Empowerment: Patients might have questions before the treatment and post-treatment, leading to a lack of trust in the process.

We came up with five significant hypothetical statements from the hypothesis mentioned above. We decided to test out through our next phase of the research involving interviews and engagement tools.

We shortlisted the actors involved in the health sector and decided to do one on one interviews with them. The list of actors interviewed were practitioners, patients, carers and nurses. I reached out to the MND Scotland’s information officer for an interview and a list of questions about MND Scotland as an organisation and its relation with NHS. However, due to busy timelines, the officer could not schedule an interview. Instead, they provided us with links to the blogs written by the carers of the patients who have Parkinson’s disease about their experiences. As I could not find relevant participants for the interview, I went through the interviews of Parkinson’s disease patients online. Reading the experiences and listening to the interviews was very beneficial to understand the difficulties faced by the patients and the carers.

My team members scheduled interviews with the NHS practitioners, nurses and patients. These interviews helped us plan the future road map to design the engagement tools for the project.