Abstract
Many of the key priorities of primary health and hospital systems - Integrated Care, Value Based/Outcome Focused Care, Person Centered Care – seek to have the consumer or community at the centre of care. To achieve that consumers and communities are ideally significantly involved in the design and delivery of care. However, we often lack the tools to enable the consumer or community to take on a strong partnership role with service providers.
Established design and improvement methodologies such as Human Centred Design and Lean can provide the building blocks for a range of tools that can support a co-design approach to service development, implementation and review.
Human Centred Design (HCD) seeks to collectively define the issues and problems to be solved by understanding the detail of the issues from different perspectives (customers, service deliverers and other key stakeholders). It then distils the key components and contributing factors of those issues.
Lean improvement seeks to systematically find ways to deliver more value to customers faster. It does this by providing a range of tools to explore business processes and identify opportunities for improvements.
This paper will provide practical tools for anyone who wants to facilitate or support the co-design of health services including:
- Consumers
- Community members
- Clinicians and
- Service Managers
These tools have been successfully used in a range of service settings to co-design or re-design a variety of services (including start-ups and well established services).
Three tools will be outlined:
- 4 Hats are Better than One (utilising Edward de Bono’s 6 Thinking Hats)
- Personas and Swim Lanes (utilising HCD persona tools and Lean Swim Lanes)
- Implementation Boards and Consumer Boards
These tools can be used to:
- Combat group think and surface ideas and concepts that would not otherwise be heard
- Test ideas, assumptions, common practices to generate new ways of thinking about issues
- Road-test designs with a particular focus on how consumers and carers may experience proposed or existing services
- Identify critical services issues from user perspectives
- Efficiently process a range of themes or implementation issues
De identified examples from co-design activities will be provided to demonstrate how these tools can enable:
- Problem definition and solution design utilising different consumer and service lenses
- Environments and processes that support connection, learning and trust
- Creative ideas and solution options
The presentation will briefly discuss tool development and selection. In particular it will consider the range of cultural contexts in which similar tools can be employed.
The presentation will conclude by discussing how similar tools can be built to address a range of co-design challenges.
This oral paper is an overview and can be presented as a 60-90 minute interactive workshop if preferred.