Bespoke study - we need input from cyclists!

Bit of a long reply

TLDR: Thanks, some good points that we will look into. We recognise we may have mis-weighted the meeting. We need the critics as well as those who already think we are on the right tracks so come and join the public representative group and help make it better. This was only the start of the conversation not the end of it.

Hi @WjPrince Thanks for your feedback. Our invitation on this site and elsewhere said:

“We are about to start a study which will look at the circumstances
surrounding accidents and the severity of injuries sustained by
cyclists attending emergency departments, and explore how well
patients recover from their injuries. However, we need cyclists to get
involved by telling us what is important to them and what would be
important areas to focus on in the study.”

From your report I think we mostly achieved this. The well established methodology that you discuss is well established and much of it will be used. We also need to reflect the changing face of research. This is that if the population being studied doesn’t input into the design of studies we can’t hope to provide the answers to questions that are important to them.

Neil and Ben the designers who put the collideosco.pe together did ask at the end for feedback on the design. They also discussed the fine balance between gathering specific data and making the data capture form too long. If you have feedback on the design of the collideosco.pe web app please email us @ bespoke {[at]} bartshealth . nhs .uk and we will feed back to them.

The app has started to receive a good amount of coverage and was featured on the ITN news at the same time as the meeting. We are working with other organisations to continue to spread the word.
We also want to continue to work with other cycling groups and stakeholders and both have been invited to work with us and advise us. We were pretty clear on our lack of agenda in setting out to set up a study like bespoke and that continues to be the case.
The work for bespoke has happened in our own time because our jobs are funded to work on other projects in NHS roles. This was the first public consultation event, of this kind, that our team has been involved in. As a result we have learnt a lot from the process and feedback like this is valued.

Other studies typically consult small groups (6-8) and use that as their consultation. We very much wanted to make it more open and not restrict the numbers who could attend. 120 signed up for the meeting about 60% attended.

In response to some of your other points:

“· The stated aim was to put cyclists at the heart of the research
where we shape the study. But the reality was us telling researcher
whether their ideas were any good.”

We had to come up with a way of having a meaningful feedback with up to 120 people in a room, with limited time and no resources. This was challenging and we thought unstructured discussion would have been unproductive. We were cognisant that not everyone would be confident to talk openly. The method we chose hopefully allowed everyone to express their view. Those who did voice opinions were encouraged and similarly evaluated by using the same methods to evaluate our starting points. We will work to include those ideas which the cyclists present felt strongly about.

We recognise that we perhaps weighted this section too much on the hospital side – as always hindsight is 20:20. This is an aspect we can try to develop further with those who volunteer to get involved in the on-going public group to support and advise us. Perhaps @WjPrince you would be interested to join this? If you email us I can arrange a time to call and discuss what this would entail.

“· No mention of extracting all the rich near miss and minor accident
data out of the RoadSafe database.”

We would have welcomed this suggestion at the meeting and will look into this. Thanks. For clarity are you talking about the Met roadsafe database that @TW refers to?

“· Cycling advocacy needs to be taken out of the hands of white men
with grey beards.”

Not one beard in the team and advocacy is still very much in the hands of organisations like CTC and LCC which we are not seeking to oust frankly they are brilliant at it and it is not within our remit.

@TW The road safe database is owned by the Met and by its nature probably biases the data to situations where other road users are involved/there is some degree of criminality? It also lacks fine location data. We will approach the Met and ask whether they have a way of exporting this data in a way that will allow it to be similarly mapped.

As for the forum links there are currently 267 pages of unstructured, human readable data. To evaluate this is a huge task and is open to bias from the interpretation.

However It would be great if we could work with the forum to include a stickied post in that thread/sidebar for reporting injuries. If anyone could point us in the right direction for this please do.

We are still open for applications from people to join our smaller public representation group. We are not looking for “yes men/women” and would welcome those who want to work with us to make bespoke better.

This was only the start of the conversation not the end of it.