About the Beneficial Changes Network

The Beneficial Changes Network (BCN) was a collaborative group of health and social care stakeholders and people with lived experience who wanted to harness and capture the benefits of changes that had taken place through COVID-19 and beyond and evaluate these changes, to share the knowledge and embed the learning of local experiences across the entire health and care sector.

The network engaged with stakeholders, partners and people with lived experience from across health and social care to listen, share and understand the impact and the benefits of change and the unintended consequences they wanted to mitigate going forward. The network reached out to frontline stakeholders through surveys, big conversations, crowd-sourcing and other means of engagement.

They formed 16 workstreams of specialist teams who were best placed to gather, develop and progress the beneficial changes. They reached out to staff, patients and carers to talk about experiences, ideas and changes that had taken place through COVID-19. Individuals from all backgrounds and job roles were approached, whether that be front line clinicians, non-clinical staff or domiciliary workers.

Collaboration and insight were sourced from other external health organisations too, such as NHS Confed, NHS Providers, the Kings Fund, Academic Health Science Networks, local authorities and others.

People with lived experience such as patients or carers, or those with a health inequalities perspective, were central to shaping and assessing any possible changes to retain and spread of the submissions made by staff of beneficial changes they wanted to share.

The workstreams received more than 3000 submissions detailing people’s perspective and suggestions for beneficial changes. A team of evaluation experts reviewed these and distilled them using a thematic analysis that involved scrutinising the documents and tagging them. The tags were then group together into themes. Alongside these submissions, the evaluation team reviewed a further 250, , documents and pieces of evidence from other health and care organisations. This then produced a long list of 700 recognised beneficial changes. We subsequently captured further learning and emerging post pandemic service changes from across health and care which are hosted on our FutureNHS community.

We found five consistent themes of change which emerged across all stakeholder groups:

Beneficial changes themes of change

1. Patients, carers and communities
2. People and culture
3. Clinical and service
4. System and partnerships
5. Digitally-enabled care