‘Inspiring Stories’ with Sian Holt

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‘Inspiring Stories’ with Sian Holt

Research Fellow, Big Data in Health Team, PPM

This is part of the Engaged Medicine ‘Inspiring Stories’ blog series. The blogs explore the stories behind outreach and patient-public engagement activities of staff and students from the University of Southampton’s Faculty of Medicine. 

What did you do to engage with the public?

In our research, we often don’t hear the voices of people who might need the most support. I wanted to engage with the public to hear these voices, listen to their stories and work together to find out how research can best help them. We wanted to do this using a non-traditional approach, engaging in creative conversations. Games have been used in healthcare as a tool to have difficult conversations and make them more fun! Therefore, we decided to use the Listening Café sessions to unpick the challenges of having conversations about long-term conditions and creating a game together to address these challenges. With collaboration with our PPI Officers, Sonia Newman and Kate Henaghan-Sykes, we ran a series of Listening Café events with attendees from the Pickles Coppice Family Hub and staff member from the Clovelly Family Hub in Southampton. A visual artist was also in attendance. This project was funded by the Public Engagement with Research Unit, Public Engagement Development Fund Award 2023/24.

The Listening Café model was first developed by Sonia Newman and has been a successful approach delivered by Sonia and Kate Henaghan-Sykes who co-founded The Finding out Together team, to facilitate and support researchers, to engage with and involve people from underserved communities to inform their research. The principles of the Listening Café being that the best conversations are had around the ‘kitchen table’, around food. 

During these Listening Cafés, we co-designed a game called “Understanding Me: Inside and Out”. The game has two elements: 1) understanding how you cope best with daily challenges and talking about your coping strategies with other people, so they can help you too, and 2) myth-busting common misconceptions about what it’s like to live with health conditions to help others understand you better.

Why did you use the Listening Café approach?

Our research team normally involve PPI members with lived experience and invite them to share in our University space. The Listening Café model offers the opportunity to meet the community in their own spaces, with researchers being invited to attend rather than researchers inviting the public to participate.  

The stories that people share in their own spaces and the ownership they have over the conversations really make the research feel very different, and very special. 

We heard from people who do not usually get involved in our research studies – their stories directly influenced what kind of game would be most useful to them, and their challenges with living with long-term conditions. This added richness to our understanding, and empowered the community to engage with research in a creative way. If we’d have created the game without them, it would have looked so different. This really proves the value and the power of co-designed creative conversations. 

Our community partners also enjoyed the sessions, felt it was a safe space to share their thoughts, felt listened to and helped, felt the sessions were worthwhile, felt we worked well together as a team and enjoyed co-creating a game. Together, the community empowered themselves by turning their stories and challenges into a positive game, which would allow them to better understand themselves and each other. This contributed towards further developing trusted relationships between the research community and the public. 

How did you evaluate the impact of your work, and the ongoing legacy?

We evaluated the impact of our work by a consistent feedback process during Listening Café events. This included feedback forms that our community partners completed at the end of each session. We also included regular verbal check-ins during the sessions to assess how well we were working together, if the process seemed worthwhile and if the game was seen as potentially useful.

As part of our final sessions, the groups played the game and evaluated how useful they found it and gave suggestions for future improvements. We aim to incorporate these changes in V2 of the game and apply for future grant funding to support this development, continuing our partnerships with undeserved communities.

During this process, we have created a future model for research projects involving creative conversations and have plans to share our learning. This includes seminars, conferences and a publication co-authored with our community partners, funded by Research Culture Funding 2024-25. We have also developed a new partnership with a visual artist, who is now connected to our department for future collaborations.

Stay Connected! To find out more about the ‘Inspiring Stories’ series, Faculty of Medicine educational programmes and research, or to get involved use the links below or contact Prof Lucy Green. 

University staff or students click here for the Engaged Medicine SharePoint.