Our project focused on care-at-home services (also known as virtual wards), an emerging and rapidly growing NHS initiative where hospital-level care is delivered in the patient's home. This approach offers several potential benefits to patients, families, staff, and health systems, and yet it also introduces significant challenges in terms of clarity, cohesion, and trust-building.



We approached this project by examining these services on two different levels. Firstly, we conducted a systemic analysis to understand barriers and enablers to effective care-at-home services across the UK. Secondly, we contributed to the transformation of a virtual ward service within a specific organisation, DHU Healthcare.

At both levels, our design interventions centred on facilitating new forms of conversation between key stakeholders.

At the systemic level, we established a new space for conversations: a working group involving multiple organisations within the NHS, facilitating the exchange of learning, insights, and perspectives on the challenges of providing patient-centric care in this new context.

With DHU, our research revealed that the service was undersubscribed due to a lack of confidence and clarity among referring clinicians. As a response to this insight, we restructured the conversations where DHU first introduces and explains the service to their community partners. Specifically, we developed a toolkit that helps foster empathy through storytelling, clarity through journey visualisation, and engagement through interactivity and built-in feedback mechanisms. Overall, the conversation toolkit allows referring clinicians to better understand the service and its benefits, increasing their likelihood of placing referrals when they encounter an appropriate patient.