Co-Designing Health Care Solutions with Patient Representatives and Clinicians in a Large Acute Hospital Setting: Process and Engagement

Abstract

The benefits of involving patients and wider members of the public as partners in care are being increasingly recognised internationally. Co-design is one of the methods reported to promote patient-based health service improvements and offers a participatory approach to engage patients and citizens in solving health care challenges. However, current limitations are levelled at this corpus of work, indicating a lack of sustainability and substantive evidence of any known associated processes that can yield sustainable longer-term patient benefit. This service improvement project was underpinned by a Human Centred Design (HCD) methodology incorporating the Design Council’s process Discover, Define, Develop and Deliver [1]. This assisted in providing a participatory framework of co-produced work over a twelve-month period with three clinical pathway teams, Stroke, Children and Young People (CYP) and Learning and Developmental Disabilities (LD.) Meeting specific project objectives, patient-based projects were developed using a toolkit and Collaborative Action Plans that steered involvement throughout. Evaluative results elicited three themes, generating a product idea together, acknowledging the contribution of all, barriers and challenges. Within this, the clinicians and patient representatives reported the value of having a safe space to carry out experienced based work with their respective patient representatives. Additionally, they reported the chosen HCD framework guided the process of engagement determining co-produced health care solutions to patient derived challenges. Conclusions are drawn that suggest further work and research is required to testbed the ‘how to’ processes associated with successful co-design in health and social care. This could provide an empirical basis for the value and process associated with sustainable human centred design required at both a micro and macro level of healthcare.