Discovery about the digital channels used to increase understanding of genomic medicine for the Genomics Education Programme
We were asked by Health Education England (HEE) to run a Discovery for the Genomics Education Programme (GEP) website.
The GEP delivers and advises on learning and development opportunities that support healthcare professionals to embed genomic medicine into their everyday practice. It has a wealth of educational resources from MSc qualifications to eLearning courses, videos and even a board game.
The Programme caters for frontline staff including GPs, nurses and midwives as well as more specialised roles such as clinical geneticists, laboratory scientists and bioinformaticians. They wanted to explore how their website could intuitively support this broad audience without becoming an infinite catalogue of expert resources.
We conducted interviews, workshops, card sorts, usability tests of the existing site with geneticists, healthcare scientists, doctors, trainees, and educators, to better understand where and how such education could fit into their work. We co-designed website concepts to show how genomics education courses and resources (including videos and interactive content) might be delivered to meet user needs.
A particular challenge with this work was to balance the needs of a diverse set of users across the NHS workforce. We worked closely with the GEP team to understand and then break down distinct user roles and behaviours, to ensure that our research was able to address the breadth of experience and expectations across the target user groups for the programme.
We presented a comprehensive 90+ page report with recommendations and initial prototypes. And we continued to work with the in-house team as they delivered the next phase of work, based on our recommendations. The new Genomics Education Programme website went live in June 2019.