Our Methods

At the Change Lab we utilise a robust yet pragmatic methodology to understand the behaviours associated with any healthcare challenge, co-design innovative solutions, and test these in an experiment.

Through this approach we are able to achieve maximal impact in realistic timeframes.

At the Change Lab, we work as a collaboration between academics at the Institute of Global Health Innovation at Imperial College London, experts from the Behavioural Insights Team, and strategy colleagues at Imperial College NHS Healthcare Trust. This collaborative approach ensures we can answer key healthcare challenges and priorities through a rigorous and expert led approach.

Deciding on a healthcare challenge

Whilst there might be thousands of interesting behavioural science questions and opportunities for research, at Change Lab we know that the most successful interventions have support and buy in from healthcare organisation themselves.

That's why we don't decide on what challenge to work on - we work closely with our collaborators and key stakeholders working on the frontline to ensure our project address key safety and strategic priorities.

Understanding the target behaviour

The first step of any Change Lab project is to establish what the target behaviour we are trying to change is. Once we have done this, we employ a range of qualitative research techniques to explore this further. This might be through in depth qualitative interviews, or observations within the healthcare environment.

We work with key stakeholders and frontline staff to ensure the data we capture is reflective of the real-world environment. When analysing the findings we combine these with evidence from academic literature helping us to learn what has and hasn't worked well in the past.

The synthesised insights from this exploratory research then underpin our intervention design process.

The importance of co-design

A key feature of all Change Lab work is that our interventions are co-designed with subject matter experts and representatives of the intended audience. We work in conjunction with healthcare professionals, patients and the public to ensure our interventions are co-designed for the end user, by the end user.

Each project has a steering group that guide us through the research process, ensuring our activities are appropriate, inclusive and get the best results.

We innovate through our intervention co-design process, typically holding a series of interactive workshops and activities that encourage blue sky thinking to solve healthcare challenges, beyond typical limitations. We then work through a series of steps to refine our intervention, ensuring anything we take forwards to an experiment is both impactful and feasible.

Testing our innovative solutions

We know that solving healthcare challenges can mean interventions get implemented quickly, and often without proper evaluation.

At Change Lab, testing our innovative interventions robustly is a crucial part of our methodology - ensuring that the recommendations we make have a strong evidence base. Depending on the nature of the project and the required time frames, we have several approaches to evaluation.

Where possible, we aim to conduct scientific evaluations with ethics approval, such as conducting randomised controlled trials. We are also highly experienced in the conduct of service evaluations and quality improvement projects, working closely with NHS partners.