Qualitative evaluation

We have been talking to doctors and patients at Royal Derby Hospital to evaluate the study interventions using qualitative methods. Doctors have told us in interviews what they think about the financial cost and radiation harm messages, whether they feel their decision-making has been influenced and why. We are holding focus groups with recent hospital inpatients to explore their attitudes to the financial cost message intervention. It is important to have patient involvement in the project, particularly when using costs to influence decision-making that could affect their care.

We will analyse all of these data to improve our understanding of the impact of the interventions and identify barriers to wider adoption of adding cost and harm messages to test results. This type of qualitative work is really useful in learning what does and doesn’t work in strategies to improve efficiency and reduce waste in health care.  We would like to thank all of the doctors and patients who are giving up their time to talk to us and we look forward to sharing the findings of these studies.

Ben Young (Research Fellow), July 2018