Jeanette Sutton is an Associate with Iriss. She is responsible for the maintenance and development of the ASPire Hub.
Seven minutes might not feel like much, but it’s long enough to learn something new. That’s the thinking behind seven-minute briefings, several of which now sit on the ASPire Hub. These briefings provide an accessible way into a topic and are – to boot – lovely and colourful!
Awkwardly for researchers, we’re all quite different in terms of our concentration span. Some of us are prone to distraction, with that pesky internet always on hand to help with lapses in our attention; some of us moan that sixty-minute lectures just aren’t long enough. However, seven minutes does seem to be a good bet for most folk. Research by the online publishing platform Medium – which obviously has a vested interest in knowing how we engage our eyeballs – found that seven minutes was the time that, on average, most people spent reading a post on their website.
Seven-minute briefings tap into this optimum attention span too. They provide a clearly structured way to find out the nuts-and-bolts of a topic. Each part of the seven-minute briefing is broken down further, into one-minute bitesize chunks, with each chunk clearly setting out the essentials.
Take the most recent seven-minute briefing on the ASPire Hub, which focuses on Adult Support and Protection for GPs, primary care and other health staff. Minute 1 tells us why ASP in primary care matters; minute 2 builds on this with the legal framework; minute 3 sets out the duty to co-operate; minute 4 is about staff responsibilities; minute 5 looks at information sharing; minute 6 is on health leadership; and minute 7 links to further tools. And that, in a nutshell, is it!
Another fantastic seven-minute briefing deals with financial harm. As the subject of the most recent ASPire (which had a particular focus on older adults), this is such an important topic in ASP right now. The seven-minute briefing gets to the heart of the topic, particularly focusing on Section 10 requests. It can be used by the whole range of professionals working in ASP including financial institutions, who may not be so familiar with the topic.
The ASPire Hub also needs to give a shoutout to NHS Tayside, who created their own seven-minute briefing.This one is on the ASP responsibilities of all healthcare practitioners. NHS Tayside kindly shared it with the ASPire Hub, allowing all to use and adapt it for their own local areas.
As the seven-minute briefing format becomes more widely known, we hope the ASPire Hub will get many, many more examples. But it’s probably the right point to bring this blog post to an end – wouldn’t want to exceed a seven-minute reading time!
