Abstract
Introduction
How do we elicit our community's thoughts and ideas about the design of medical education? How
has the pandemic shifted our learning experience for teachers, residents, and patients? Our
versatility, adaptation, and ability to fail fast and forward have emerged as important traits in this
quickly changing landscape. In this session, we will address these questions and experiment
through the design thinking paradigm.
Aims Objectives Theory or Methods
Design thinking, a method of co-evolution of problem and solution, has gained traction in
healthcare and medical education as a way to promote a greater understanding of users’
experience and to help unpack the challenges and opportunities that we are confronting in our
educational journey and delivery of care. Teams are guided through five highly collaborative phases
of user empathy, defining the problem, ideation, prototyping, and testing.
Highlights or Results or Key Findings
The ultimate goal is to create a product that can be implemented by team members. We will provide
examples of how design thinking has been used within UBC’s Department of Family Practice to
rethink our curriculum and develop meaningful relationships with our surrounding healthcare
community.
Conclusions
Design thinking provided the opportunity for our faculty, administration, and students to voice their
concerns and more importantly create solutions that address their environment’s contextual and
temporal constraints and affordances. Participants of our design thinking sessions described the
experience as highly collaborative and thought-provoking. Furthermore, during COVID-19
pandemic, this paradigm
Implications for applicability/transferability sustainability and limitations
The design thinking paradigm is one that can be easily transferred to any setting where participants
are open to new ideas and thoughts about the challenges and opportunities presented.