We worked with two large GP practices in Staffordshire to trial a Behavioural Science approach to influencing patient demand and make better use of practice resources.
We identified three areas of focus and co-designed simple initiatives: Patient First Point of Contact; Patient & Clinician Interactions & Physical Environment & Signage.
These initiatives were trialled for 6 months and were found to be simple and cheap to implement. Analysis of EMIS data demonstrated:
Influencing Primary Care Demand through Behaviour Change
The Primary Care Access Recovery Plan (May 2023) sets out the Department of Health & Social Care's ambitions to improve patient access and satisfaction. The plan makes commitments to empower patients through digital tools, increase capacity in Primary Care and cut bureaucracy.
At Caja, our passion lies in bolstering the NHS, with a special focus on supporting Primary Care as it navigates the growing demand and strain on services. We're committed to staying at the forefront of innovation, employing creative techniques such as behavior change strategies to effectively address this escalating demand.
Influencing Demand, Empowering Patients, Improving Health Outcomes
Our work with our Primary Care clients have focused on ethically influencing the behaviours of both patients and professionals utilising Behavioural Science techniques such as Nudge Theory.
By combining our healthcare experience with behaviour change and our robust data analytics capability, we've effectively designed behavioural interventions across Primary Care services.
White Paper
Addressing Primary Care Access Challenges: Leveraging Behavioural Science for Service Excellence
Leave your details below and we'll email you a copy of our white paper written by the Behavioural Science team around how we can use behavioural science to address Primary Care access issues.
Our work in applying behavioural science within a healthcare setting has resulted in Caja being shortlisted for the 2023 Association for Business Psychology Awards:
Boost Immunisation Rates
Immunisation prevents 3.5-5
million deaths annually from
diseases like Influenza and
COVID-19, making it a vital part of
primary healthcare.
However, despite rates of the virus
being higher in the 2022/23 winter
months than in 2021/22, national
uptake of influenza vaccinations
was lower in all at risk groups.
Additionally, less than 20% of adult
social care staff in England have
been vaccinated against influenza
– coinciding with the virus placing
significant stress on the NHS and a
notable shortage in the social care
workforce.
Caja has significant experience in applying principles from
behavioural science to create tangible shifts in vaccine
uptake across diverse populations. Here is how we could
help you achieve potentially life changing results in your
context:
Best Practice Birmingham 2023
At this year's Best Practice Birmingham conference, Nigel Guest, Caja Director will be presenting and inviting the audience to consider why ‘Immediacy’ is a key driver in patient behaviours in relation to access and how a combination of technology, social and cultural influences are increasing expectation on healthcare providers – temporal discounting means we tend to value immediate gains over delayed rewards.
Nigel will outline Caja’s experience of applying Behavioural Science techniques in Primary Care to influence the behaviours of both patients and professionals. He will introduce some basic concepts that provide insights from psychology, economics and sociology that have been proven to deliver tangible results – in some cases the results have been game changing.
Attendees will hear about some relevant case studies where Behavioural Science has been successfully applied in Primary Care and how the approach has been used ethically.
The session will set-out a compelling journey through the nexus of human behaviour and its impact on demand and satisfaction. Attendees will be prompted to reflect on how they communicate and engage with patients and the balance between influencing different behaviours whilst maintaining individual autonomy.
South Staffordshire CCG
SYB Cancer Alliance
Public Health, South Tees
1 in 2 people in the UK will experience cancer during their lifetime but around 4 in 10 UK Cancer cases are preventable, that’s more than 135,000 every year. Early diagnosis is vital to successful treatment with the NHS Long Term (LTP) 2019 setting out an ambition for 75% of cancer patients to be diagnosed at Stage I or II by 2028.
Caja was commissioned to provide consultancy support to business operations in designing behavioural science ‘nudges; to initially improve uptake for cervical and breast screening and to trial the approach with providers in primary care.
During the project, we supported South Yorkshire and Bassetlaw Cancer Alliance raise awareness of behavioural science across their stakeholder groups and demonstrated how it can be used as a tool to support demand management and change management.
We constructed decision architectures for Cervical and Breast Cancer, highlighting the points where eligible women make choices that directly impacted screening uptake e.g. whether to book an appointment, to attend an appointment once booked etc. We then developed a set of hypotheses covering each of these decision points that could be addressed by applying behavioural ‘nudges’. The development of hypothesis was supported by detailed data analytics, demand forecasting and visualisations to develop ‘Behavioural Insights’ that layered NHS data and other data sources such as ONS population statistics.
We used our analysis to identify the PCNs where the implementation assets could make the greatest impact and operational improvement e.g. areas of socio-economic deprivation and lower screening uptake and the Cancer Alliance team engaged with a broad range of Practices to identify those most keen to trial the interventions with their patients. This resulted in a range of GP Practices as test sites - several actively testing the change interventions plus a ‘control’.
Trials of the approach in primary care are starting to evidence a positive impact. As a result of the project the SYB Cancer Alliance has achieved:
At the time of project commencement, Tees Valley CCG reported a first dosage uptake rate of 81.2%, well below the nationwide aspirational target of 90%, set by NHS England. This relatively poor performance was largely driven by significant hesitancy amongst males in the 18-44 age range from the Middlesbrough area, with 38.6% of these individuals being unvaccinated.
Using our CogntivQITM Methodology we provided a number of research-informed recommendations to the client on ways to increase vaccination clinic attendance in the Middlesbrough area, with a specific focus on increasing first-dose vaccination rates amongst working age males. These included:
A breakdown of vaccinations in the Middlesbrough area by dose has provided a promising indication of the successfulness of our work to increase first-dose uptake with a near-10% increase in first-dose share compared to the national figures, with 22.25% of the recorded vaccinations being first doses. These data suggest that our approach successfully nudged individuals in Middlesbrough who had not yet been vaccinated to attend the advertised clinics over and above the standard communications being used across the rest of the country.
Want to learn more about how to influence demand using behaviour change?
Come say hello in Birmingham NEC this October
Meet the Team
With extensive experience within Health and Social Care, the Caja Team will be at the Best Practice Birmingham Conference, showcasing the success we've helped our clients achieve.
Nigel Guest
Caja, DirectorNigel is an experienced award-winning Director, business transformation and improvement practitioner with over 30 years’ leadership and operational management experience in the public and private sector, including senior Director roles in a FTSE 100 company.
Caroline Brown
Caja, Managing DirectorCaroline is a highly motivated and energetic facilitator of strategic business change. Caroline has gained her experience for KPMG Accenture HR Services as the European and TATA Consultancy, as the Global Head of HR Shared Services/Outsourcing.
Richard Torr
Caja, Data & BI SpecialistRichard is an information and analytics professional with entrepreneurial business experience and management consultancy skills including Strategy Mapping, KPI & Scorecard Design, Decision Analytics & Systems Thinking. He has developed complex analytics and data visualisations for various behavioural science projects in Cancer Screening, Immunisation and COVID Vaccination programmes across many Caja clients.
Andrew Dewis
Caja, Behavioural Science ConsultantAndrew is an expert in human decision-making and data analysis. Andrew has supported a number of behaviour change projects, achieving notable successes in increasing COVID-19 vaccination rates, encouraging cervical screening attendance, and nudging individuals towards anti-viral COVID treatments.
Symeon Dionysis
Caja, Behavioural Science ConsultantSymeon is a Behavioural Scientist and Psychologist who recently graduated from Nottingham University with his PhD. His experience ranges across both public and private sectors in Europe; however, he has had specific interest in the development of Children and Young people contributing to publications and presentations on the Prodromal Symptoms of Development Disorders during the first year of life, The Dimensions of Eating Disorders in Pre-school Age. Since joining Caja, Symeon has been working on projects across several Local Authority and NHS clients delivering research support and Behaviour Change.
