We collaborated with Professor Sara Shaw and Natassia Brenman from the University of Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, Sophie Spitters from the Centre for Primary Care at Queen Mary University of London, and the University of Manchester on an 18-month research project to explore these questions.

View online resource

Our role

We supported both the research and design process, helping to develop practical tools for understanding and improving primary care experiences. Our contributions included:

• Supporting fieldwork and stakeholder engagement through co-design
• Creating ‘practice maps’ and ‘healthcare journeys’ to visualise how primary care is currently navigated
• Developing a ‘service blueprint’ that maps patient experiences and practice decisions across key stages of the consultation journey

Early prototypes took the form of posters and provocations that explored different types of language and openness, for example, expressing a practice’s aspirations for patient-centred care alongside its ongoing challenges with resources and community needs.

Co-design workshops and provocations

We ran online sessions and in-person workshops with practice staff and patient groups to gather lived experiences and test new ideas. We also worked closely with the research team to review and distil this feedback into a final set of co-designed journey cards for stakeholders to evaluate.

Final outputs

Following extensive co-design workshops, the researchers identified a critical gap: patients often struggled to understand the full journey from feeling unwell to receiving care. To help bridge this gap, we created a customisable template document for practices, tailored to their specific processes and communities.

The patient journey was structured around six key steps:

• Decide if you need to see us
• Choose how to get in touch
• We listen to you
• We decide what care to offer
• We agree the best way to support you
• If you’re not sure what’s happening, get in touch

This resource offers practices a way to make the consultation process more transparent, accessible and patient-centred.

We translated the resource into Arabic and Portuguese to broaden accessibility. We plan to translate it into 10–15 additional languages after the initial pilot phase.

Looking ahead

This work is about more than documentation. It’s about equipping patients, providers and policymakers with tools to better navigate – and even shape – the future of primary care. It’s also part of wider research exploring the concept of ‘remote by default’, for which we have been helping the team develop a range of visually led policy notes. You can read about these here.

If you’re working in health or social care and want to turn complex systems into clear, people-centred communication, we’d love to hear from you.