What is the positive change that has emerged through new collaborations or partnerships during Covid-19 that your project is going to embed?

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has brought untimely death (40,000+ in the UK alone) to people’s attention and a need to make appropriate plans for an unpredictable future.

With patient visits often prohibited in hospitals for safety reasons and patients frequently intubated and under anesthesia, many COVID-19 patients have been unable to address their family’s financial situations.

Getting financial planning right has an enormous emotional and material impact on loved ones and family and its effect has come into sharp focus during the COVID pandemic where often families last see their relative when they were admitted to hospital with COVID-19.

Q members with experience from the financial sector have paired with NHS staff during the pandemic to start exploring solutions to this widespread problem.

What does your project aim to achieve?

Objective: Empower all patients to easily make informed financial decisions for their future anywhere and anytime rather than having to act in difficult and often unexpected health circumstances

By enabling anyone, anywhere at anytime to securely inventory, store and track their personal estate and providing them with access to financial education they will have the ability to:

1. Improve their understanding of financial guidance and their access to financial advice

2. View their financial situation holistically to understand if / how products like protection insurance written in trust can assist their loved ones

3. Simply and affordably create and update their will

4. Share their personal financial information with their chosen partner / executor if / when probate is required

How will the project be delivered?

Our team of three bring skills and experience in finance, e-commerce, start-ups, organisational leadership, strategy, product and project management. We have been working with John Lodge (Q community member and founder of Hexitime) to understand how the NHS approaches the challenge of innovation and how best to engage with and support patients and staff. See examples of how we are engaging skills we need, for. e.g: https://hexitime.com/activity/end-of-life-care-professionals-required-for-exciting-q-exchange-innovation

Applying the user centric design approach we will run a proof of concept with a prototype which will inform the development of our MVP. Our impact measurement approach is being refined with service user feedback.

Through the Q and Hexitime communities we aim to engage clinical nursing and medical staff, hospital operations and HR teams and the Academic Health Science Networks to inform design and distribution of what we are certain is a critical part of everyone’s long-term wellbeing and mental health.

How is your project going to share learning?

For us being part of the Q community is all about sharing time, experience and information in support of others. We plan to share the expertise we accumulate in the marketing, sales and contract development for such a unique and sensitive part of all our lives to inform other new and innovative projects relating to end of life. Through conferences, webinars with the Q community, engagement with charities like Marie Carrie, McMillan, Sue Ryder and others we hope to be able to change the way we approach this sometimes taboo subject and demonstrate the positive impact that financial planning can have on patients, their families and NHS staff. We are also using Hexitime.com to share our ideas and learning with the wider improvement community and to access support from the AHSNs. This project also plans to collect and share new and practically applicable data on end-of-life financial experience.