New Policy Case Study: Using behavioural insights to increase patient engagement with validation of hospital waiting lists

I have been on the advisory group of a set of projects run in the Irish Department of Health bringing behavioural science research into the administration of the Irish health service. Details of the first project from this group are available on the website of the OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation. This project drew from a wide range of literature to improve the communication to patients in the process of validating waiting lists. This is based on work conducted in 2017. Over the last number of years, we have been working on a range of topics, in particular on improving attendance rates in inpatient and outpatient settings. Many of the project advisory team also formed part of the behavioural change subgroup of the covid public health emergency response team in Ireland (described here in a previous post). I will update this post as new papers and publications emerge from the project.

Update: The Department of Health has updated their webpage to include a range of reports in the area of behavioural research and health services.