Categories: ​NFP, Health Care, Member Services, Customer Understanding, Qualitative

 

Challenge: 

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Asthma Australia aims to assist children and their carers in engaging in their asthma care more proactively, keeping them out of hospital, living optimally and reducing their risk of death. To understand the hurdles to achieving this, Asthma Australia commissioned a deep dive into the perspective of children and their carers who live and deal with asthma and asthma events. The research aimed to validate and optimise the asthma patient journey map, and identify key pain points and barriers that interfere with optimal outcomes for young people with asthma

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Approach:

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To explore the motivations and understanding that lie behind the choices people make, qualitative research was conducted. A variety of information gathering techniques were employed including:

• A series of online tasks over 5 days including a proximal asthma control test, video diaries, and picture mapping

• In-person in-depth interviews with both carers and their children 5-14 years old – using a mix of direct questioning and projective techniques

• Online in-depth interviews with teenagers 15-18 years

 

Interviews were recorded and analysed using traditional qualitative analysis methods.

 

Impact:

 

Our findings refined the asthma patient journey, from the perspective of young people with asthma, and identified core underlying features of the condition that create a landscape of misperception and complacency toward asthma.

 

We further identified a complex set of interacting factors that influence a child’s trajectory through this landscape, driving them towards optimal or poorer outcomes with their asthma.

 

These factors were categorised into six distinct sub-groups that play differing roles at various times through the journey of a young person with asthma, and create barriers to optimal behaviour and asthma management.

 

These factors, working with the customer journey, created a framework with a more detailed and nuanced understanding of patient mental models, that can be used to develop more appropriate messaging and interventions to increase the likelihood of creating behavioural change across the various stages of the asthma journey.

 

Asthma Australia has received funding to develop a campaign designed to address some of the key barriers to proactive asthma management identified in the research. The model developed will be validated in quantitative research.