A national co-design workshop of a mobile-based application for vascular access as a patient decision aid

Increasing options for vascular access have increased the need for more effective communication to optimize patient engagement and ensure effective consent. An advanced prototype of the mobile application (VA App) was developed over 3 years as a patient decision aid. For the first time, entry to the 2021 UK Kidney Week was opened to all professions and patients and was held online. The VA App was presented in an inter-active session. This report summarizes the findings.

A 30-min interactive session was allocated with the session delivered in four sections: (1) demographic data was collected; (2) an overall opinion was obtained about current patient information sources and satisfaction with these; (3) the participants were asked a series of eight questions regarding the main problem areas previously identified; (4) following a 6-min demonstration video, the participants were then re-asked the same questions to determine if the VA App would improve/worsen these areas.

Completed data from 30 participants showed great variation in all demographics. The most cited source was verbal and rated the best, whilst all other sources were felt to be poor by 90%. All eight aspects of current information sources rated poorly. There was a unanimous agreement that the VA App could make this better. Interestingly, when the eight aspects were ranked by order of the worst to best, this matched the order of the benefits of the VA App.

This is the first report of an on-line, multi-professional co-design workshop. With a unanimous view that current systems are very limited and that better patient information systems are required, the VA App was found to be a potential solution as a patient decision aid. Interestingly, paper leaflets were widely viewed as the least used and the least effective mechanism for communicating information to patients. Funding for a commercially produced mobile application has been secured and will be further tested in the near future.