August 2024

Dear participants, your input has been invaluable in shaping our priorities and approach. We have recently submitted a funding bid to enhance our work, with a special focus on involving informal carers, such as family members. We’ll keep you posted on any significant updates regarding this.

We’re currently organizing the remaining co-design workshops for Phase I of the project, which focuses on deepening our understanding of the problems and needs we aim to address, and why these are so important. Based on your feedback from previous sessions, we’ve made several improvements, including:

• Choosing Miro over Microsoft Whiteboard for better digital collaboration.
• Slightly reducing the number of subtopics/questions from six to four or five to improve focus and clarity.
• Restructuring the questions to make them clearer and more relevant.

Each workshop will have up to eight participants. We’re still in the process of recruiting clinicians, as their schedules can be quite unpredictable due to irregular shifts. If you know of any professionals with experience in anxiety disorders who may be interested, please encourage them to contact us at luigi.moretti@uwe.ac.uk

We’re also organizing another workshop for people with personal experience of anxiety disorders, recruiting participants through UWE Bristol and local associations.

Thanks to Carmel McGrath, we’re getting in touch with caregiver/informal carer associations to involve them in our co-design journey. The current plan aims to conduct iterative co-design workshops with four different focus groups: 2x the public (people with lived experience), 1x clinicians, and 1x informal carers. The insights gathered from these groups will be aggregated and shared with all participants before we move into the next co-design phase.