Researchers from the University of Aberdeen and NHS Grampian have developed a new, practical approach to help NHS Health Boards plan and implement innovation more effectively- in spite of increasing pressures on time, workforce and finances.
The research, published in BMC Health Services Research, sets out a rapid, action‑oriented methodology that enables meaningful communication between clinicians, patients, researchers and other stakeholders without lengthy consultation processes. The approach shows that healthcare organisations can still develop responsive, inclusive and evidence‑informed strategies even under significant constraints.
Traditional five‑year strategic planning cycles often struggle to keep pace with rapid advances in medicine, digital technologies and changing population needs. At the same time, staff and patient representatives face heavy workloads that limit their ability to engage in long consultation exercises.
This study addresses that challenge by combining structured guiding questions, rapid qualitative analysis and established strategy frameworks into a single, efficient process. The result is a set of actionable, prioritised recommendations that can be immediately used to inform policy, planning and implementation.
Crucially, the research demonstrates that participatory approaches do not need to be slow or resource‑intensive to be effective.
The team put their methodology into action at the tenth annual NHS Grampian Research Conference, which took place last year. During the conference, participants took part in 14 parallel roundtable discussions, generating 148 written contributions.
Professor Seshadri Vasan, senior author and NHS Grampian’s R&D Director said: “Using simple guiding questions—What’s a key challenge in healthcare? What innovative idea could address it? Who needs to be involved? —we were able to easily identify practical strengths, challenges and potential solutions from the roundtable discussions.
“The key strengths identified included telemedicine, interdisciplinary training and strong patient and public involvement. Challenges highlighted included fragmented data systems, referral tracking and workforce pressures. From this we were able to make suggestions of potential solutions - ranging from AI‑enabled scheduling and remote monitoring as well potential ‘easy wins’ such as NHS caller identification, automated text reminders and multilingual patient information.”
Professor Jules Griffin, Director of the University of Aberdeen Rowett Institute said: “A critical challenge facing the NHS is how do we design engagement processes that are responsive, efficient, and inclusive while remaining feasible in terms of money and time. Participatory approaches offer a way to integrate diverse stakeholder perspectives, from all over the community, under these constraints, generating strategies that are appropriate for patients and the public. This approach can also raise issues that haven’t been considered and if left unmanaged, could make a strategy fail.
“We believe this methodology could improve how we deliver health care despite all the other challenges we are facing.”