RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 ‘Spending the day with your Family Health Team’: rapid ethnography of a patient-centred quality improvement event JF BJGP Open JO BJGP Open FD Royal College of General Practitioners SP bjgpopen20X101002 DO 10.3399/bjgpopen20X101002 A1 Katie N Dainty A1 Tara Kiran YR 2020 UL http://bjgpopen.org/content/early/2020/01/21/bjgpopen20X101002.abstract AB Background Primary care practices have started to explore different methods of engaging with patients to advance quality improvement. This approach leverages the strengths of citizen engagement; however, there has been a lack of empirical research to understand the impact of such an approach from the patient perspective.Aim To understand how citizen engagement can inform quality improvement in family practice.Design & setting A single-centre, rapid ethnographic evaluation of a patient engagement event.Method Ten thousand email invitations were sent and posters put up in Family Health Team (FHT) waiting rooms, resulting in 350 patient responses and the purposive recruitment of 36 participants. Observation and key informant interviews were used to collect data. The data corpus was analysed according to ethnographically-informed thematic analysis techniques.Results Analysis of the full set of field notes, patient interviews, and informal conversations with the FHT staff revealed three factors that impacted on the success of the patient engagement event: setting the stage, the power of storytelling, and the value of reframing the patient role.Conclusion The present study highlights three components of patient and public engagement approaches — the importance of setting the proper stage, storytelling as a tool, and reframing the patient role in healthcare delivery — which may provide useful guidance to those considering similar patient and public engagement events.