Over the last 3 years, it has been an honour and privilege to work as Senior Research Assistant for RHED-C (Remote Healthcare for Eating Disorders throughout COVID-19). One of the last highlights of the project was to attend the 17th London International Eating Disorders Conference 27-28 March 2025. This is the one of the most widely respected eating disorders conferences globally, attracting a diverse range of researchers and clinicians in the field.
It will come as no surprise to readers of this PaCT blog that digital literacy support has been highlighted as a major barrier to effective remote care (e.g., navigating telehealth platforms, operating camera settings, maintaining the therapeutic space remotely etc). Funded by the Medical Research Foundation, RHED-C explored service provider and service user experiences of remote care and identifies improvements for future remote service provision. Based on research recommendations from interviews with 27 service users and 10 mental health providers across the region, and additional participants via a nationwide survey (n=184), we identified key digital literacy barriers. This prompted the subsequent development of ConnectED on The Journey: a co-designed toolkit for good practice support for remote care for eating disorders.
ConnectED on The Journey was developed through 4 co-design workshops with 17 participants with lived experience and 3 UK service provider representatives. A key workshop activity was The Game: an interactive storytelling activity whereby workshop participants create a fictional character looking to access remote care support. During The Game participants support the character through the remote care experience, including dealing with digital literacy obstacles as they arise before, during, and after the character’s remote care sessions. The use of a third-party character helps reduce anxiety by removing the need for participants to reveal their own first-hand experiences, alleviating barriers to sharing. The Game can be a powerful tool to enable honest reflections on potential barriers and solutions to improve online support, helping to identify useful tools for service providers.
Based on ideas generated from the workshops, the resulting toolkit contains a series of downloadable resources focusing on specific elements of online support. Examples include PDFs such as ‘Meeting Prep’ (how to get online ready), ‘Call Privacy’ (how to maximise confidentiality) and ‘Camera on or Off?’ (camera settings including ‘hide self-view’). We are now rolling out the toolkit within an eating disorder service to further test its efficacy. You can see more by visiting the RHED-C website: https://rhedc.uk/toolkit/
So, as is ever thus for a conference presentation, I had the task of condensing 3 years of work into 15 minutes, presenting in the Treatment track for paper presentations. Our presentation outlined how the toolkit works, and discussed the potential of the toolkit as an opportunity for already stretched services to provide support for their patients or service providers, and how improved service user platform literacy has the potential to improve both service cost effectiveness and increased capacity. The presentation was positively received with an interesting question about how the toolkit could be rolled out with clinicians as a way of supporting their patients with digital literacy. And, again, as is ever thus, I had to responding by saying ‘watch this space’ as at the time we were waiting on a funding bid decision to test the toolkit in-service with both an eating disorders charity and local NHS Trust as project partners (sadly not successful, but we are still in discussion in PaCT about making this happen, so, yes, watch this space…).
The conference was interesting and the workshops programme was particularly useful. More representation from the voluntary sector would have benefitted the programme – our presentation was in the minority when it came to demonstrating work by and with eating disorders charities and the voluntary sector more broadly. Hopefully as LEDC moves from bi-annually to annually with an offer of both virtual as well as in-person attendance it might diversify the range of delegates that are able to attend.
Attending conferences is always exciting, but on this occasion, the tea/coffee break out space treated us to some rather iconic London landmarks from the upstairs window of the QEII Centre.
– Claire Murphy-Morgan
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