Improving the use of digital consent in surgical practice

The team were tasked with applying behavioural science to improve the uptake of digital consent within surgical departments. It was found that some surgical specialties were using digital consent whereas some were still using paper-based consent as the norm.

The team conducted qualitative interviews with surgical staff from a range of specialties to understand the barriers and enablers to using digital consent which generated insights into how to address this challenge. Patient Safety Partners were also involved in helping to decide the questions to ask and to help plan the intervention design.

Co-design workshops then took place with surgical staff to come up with an intervention that would best fit the target population; consenting surgical staff and the result was a feedback-based intervention which included both patient feedback as well as weekly results on specialty performances.

This intervention ran for 6 weeks and the impact is currently being analysed for results.