NHS England: Uniting stakeholders to create a vision for video use in elective care

Building a system-wide approach to health education

With over seven million people waiting for treatment post-pandemic, NHS England’s Transformation Directorate sought better ways to support patients through delays in elective care. One opportunity? Video, used to enhance understanding, reduce anxiety and promote self-care. But while video is widely available, its use is fragmented. Quality, consistency and clinical accuracy vary often leaving patients unsure what to trust.

Healthia was appointed to bring together stakeholders across the NHS to create a strategic, joined-up vision for how video could be integrated across care pathways - closing health literacy gaps and improving outcomes at scale.
‍

Our approach: collaborative systems thinking 

We embedded with NHS teams to lead a cross-system service design process, involving clinical SMEs, Royal Colleges, patient representatives and content creators. Our approach focused on:

• Collaborative workshops - Co-defining the role of video across patient pathways and settings.
• In-depth research - Understanding lived experience, practitioner needs, and production constraints.
• Synthesis and alignment - Creating shared understanding and shaping a scalable, system-wide framework.

We treated digital video not as a one-off solution but as part of a wider transformation mindset, rooted in evidence, inclusive design and long-term value.
‍
‍

A selection of the sacrificial concepts we used as visual prompts in our research

‍

What we found

To make video work at scale, the system needs to invest in five key capabilities:

• Content creation & curation – Reducing duplication and aligning content across NHS, charities and third parties.
• Quality assurance & maintenance – Ensuring clinical safety, accessibility and consistency over time.
• Hosting & accessibility – Making content easy to find, across different pathways and patient journeys.
• Content distribution – Proactively reaching people, not relying on them to search.
• Impact monitoring & improvement – Capturing feedback and usage data to refine and evolve content.

We developed and tested prototypes to explore how these capabilities could be delivered in real NHS contexts - bridging strategy and delivery.
‍

Impact: a shared vision for scale and sustainability

Our work created a strategic foundation for how the NHS can use video to support patients more effectively, including:

• Evidence-based insight – Defining what matters to staff, patients, clinicians and creators.
• A strategic model – Supporting national governance and video distribution strategy.
• A systemic framework – Clarifying what’s needed for sustainable delivery.
• Prototypes and next steps – Offering practical ways forward.
• Engaging, video-based outputs – Making the findings accessible, memorable and usable.

By working across organisational and professional boundaries, we helped NHS England take a critical first step: shifting from scattered good practice to a consistent, system-wide approach that’s inclusive, intelligent and future-ready.
‍

Feedback

"Working with the superb team at Healthia has been an absolute joy. They delivered a superb alpha phase of our elective care educational project that has helped us devise strategies around the long-term future of educational video content in the NHS. The team is flexible, reliable and diligent and we appreciated the openness of their approach."

- Digital Innovation Manager, NHS Transformation Directorate