VERDIS
"Video-based communication research and training in decision-making, empathy and pain management in supportive and palliative care."
VERDIS is a research group based out of Loughborough University, led by Professor Ruth Parry, who spent her early career as a physiotherapist in the NHS before moving into academia and studying conversation analysis. VERDIS deals in interaction and healthcare, in particular, the conversations between healthcare professionals and patients within end of life care. This encompasses many difficult communication tasks; talking about illness progression, dying and decision making in end of life care.
Part of the Centre for Research on Communication and Culture group, VERDIS is partly funded by the National Institute of Health Research and includes the Real Talk project as part of its output.
“Sensitive, effective communication lies at the heart of healthcare, including the care of people who are terminally ill. We know a lot about communication characteristics that such people and their friends/relatives prefer, e.g. empathic, honest but hopeful communication, and opportunities to be involved in plans and decisions. But, it has been hard in the past to articulate the actual skills and procedures that can achieve this kind of communication.
Video and audio based research using an approach called conversation analysis provides new possibilities for building very precise understandings of the implicit skills that staff and the people in their care use to communicate with one another. This kind of research is starting to be used to design training that is effective in improving healthcare communication.”
Brand and website design
a dozen eggs were asked to design a brand together with a website for the umbrella research group, as a place to store funders reports, blog posts and publications. The site was developed with fellow academics in mind – a repository for their latest findings where more in depth analysis can be shared.
The brand needed to be simple enough to sit above all the projects, both present and future. Their long term aims are to collect and analyse more video recordings of communication in end of life settings. Then, to evaluate whether training resources based on video recordings of actual practice can enhance the effectiveness of communication skills training.
