Patients understand the daily treatment burden of their clinical conditions far better than healthcare providers tasked with designing and managing their healthcare (Richards 2013). As such, current rhetoric emphasizes the need to include patients and families in: decision-making concerning their own healthcare; co-design of that health care, and health care research. In keeping with this patient centered approach, health care organizations in the US, UK, Europe and further afield are being asked to partner with patients to generate practice-based evidence. That is; evidence produced insitu through real time learning. Our paper shows how video-reflexive ethnography (VRE) meets these goals and supports the patient revolution itself. VRE is an interventional methodology that partners with participants to video-record in-situ practices in a healthcare setting and invites participants to interpret the visual data that they feature in and/or have gathered themselves to make sense of their own experiences and practices in collaboration with the researcher in reflexivity sessions.

As a multinational team of researchers from the UK, US and Australia using VRE in patient-centered research we draw from our experiences of involving patients and families in visual research methods and from the findings of our research, to demonstrate how VRE can become transformative for patients, researchers, clinicians and policymakers supporting the patient revolution.

We argue that VRE can promote agency of patients and families, along with clinicians by providing access to the camera as well as reflexively attending to how they interact and position themselves in health care interactions and beyond. In doing so however, the use of VRE involving patients and families presents a number of methodological questions and challenges as well as opportunities. We will share the voices of patients to demonstrate the power of this research methodology in respecting the patient perspective in health services research.