Little Orange Book evaluation and creative dissemination of results

What did the evaluation want to achieve?

The 'Little Orange Book' (LOB) was developed by the Newcastle Gateshead Clinical Commissioning Group (NGCCG) to help parents and carers of young children to self-manage common childhood symptoms and encourage appropriate use of health services. The NGCCG was looking for researchers to explore how parents had used the book, whether the LOB had reduced inappropriate Accident and Emergency attendance, and how the LOB could reach even more parents.

This study was funded by the North East and North Cumbria Child Health and Wellbeing Network, NGCCG were the primary grant holders and commissioned the research team (representing Northumbria, Newcastle, Teesside and Sunderland universities), through AskFuse, the responsive research and evaluation service run by Fuse.

 What did the evaluation involve? 

The evaluation started in January 2022 and adopted a mixed method exploratory sequential design (starts with qualitative data collection and analysis and builds to quantitative data collection and analysis) to understand the views and experiences of parents and carers from Newcastle and Gateshead regarding the Little Orange Book. During phase one an online survey was completed by 128 respondents followed by individual and group interviews with 16 of these respondents.  The focus of this was toexplore the impacts of the LOB,  how it changed their behaviour and identify enablers and barriers to using the book. 

In 2022, the evaluation team won the competitive Fuse Impact Accelerator funding to co-produce a film as a user-friendly way of showcasing key findings.  The film was co-produced with the research team, members of the CCG, local clinicians and importantly, with service users.

The team presented their findings, accessible reports and film at the accessible Fuse-hosted Creative Methods in Dissemination event in June 2023.

Who will find the results useful?

The evaluation results and recommendations will be useful for anyone producing health information for parents/carers of babies and infants.  Colleagues will also find detailed information about the LOB itself and how their service users could benefit from it.

What were the key findings of this evaluation?

Recommendations included:

• To continue to include visual content, in particular the traffic light system and images.
• To improve the diversity/inclusivity of images to better include individuals of minority ethnic origin.
• That more detail/depth could be added to a digital resource, which the hardcopy could signpost parents/carers to

What added value did working with AskFuse and Fuse bring?

For NGCCG, working with the free AskFuse service meant they could access  Fuse researchers with different expertise across 5 universities. Co-producing this evaluation between the different roles and organisations involved resulted in:

• Forming new collaborations across sectors, organisations and expertise.
• Enabling an academic researcher to become a first-time Principal Investigator.
• Opportunity for a pre-doctoral student with lived experience and with expertise in creative industries to contribute, as well as gain, research experience.
• Employing a project research assistant, who provided research experience but also contributed after the project has finished.
• Being Fuse members gave the research team access to the Fuse Impact Accelerator funding.
• An academic paper for submission to a relevant peer-reviewed journal planned.

For more information please email:

Evaluation: Principal Investigator Associate Professor Dr Lynette Shotton Northumbria University lynette.shotton@northumbria.ac.uk

Little Orange Book: Lauren Graves lauren.graves@nhs.net; Nicola Gannon nicola.gannon@nhs.net

AskFuse and Fuse would like to thank the funders and everyone who contributed and supported this evaluation.

Last modified: Fri, 24 Nov 2023 16:25:53 GMT