Abstract
Introduction: Adolescents living in remote areas face distinct challenges when accessing healthcare services and adopting healthy lifestyles (1). These challenges are exacerbated by factors such as geographic isolation, limited healthcare infrastructure, and socioeconomic disparities, which can lead to reduced access to health and well-being information and resources, making it crucial to develop targeted interventions to address the specific needs of adolescents in these regions.
To effectively address these challenges, the transformative potential of citizens and community co- approaches should be leveraged (2). Adolescents can be actively involved in the creation and design of the web application. This approach ensures that the app is not only informative but also engaging and relevant to the specific adolescents’ group (3).
In this abstract, we present a project aimed at raising awareness among adolescents about dedicated services available in their territories and enable them to their access. We present the co-design process of a webapp that will be the unique and well identifiable digital place containing integrated information on all the services dedicated to adolescents in this specific territory. Notably, this process is being supported by a multidisciplinary group of professionals, who work in the local healthcare services of the remote area.
Methods: We describe a case study, using qualitative information related to the specific process of co-design of the webAPP for the adolescents. The project is included in the Proximity care initiative that the Interdisciplinary Center “Health Science” is conducting in Tuscany for a specific remote area.
By conducting periodic group sessions, we are building a unique collaborative environment that actively involves professionals from various disciplines related to adolescent health, prevention, and health promotion; this heterogeneity of experts is fundamental to enhancing integration of care both into the webapp and for the concrete collaboration of services.
Results: The co-design process was successful and the webapp is built to emphasize healthy lifestyles promotion, in particular, addressing nutrition, physical activity, mental well-being, and substance use prevention (5). The themes were identified starting from the adolescents’ feedback and organized with the support of professionals. Professionals of different disciplines were not aware of the others’ competencies, therefore this process made them to meet each other and to build a new communication channel.
Adolescents had a first test of the co-designed webapp, that is now ready in an alpha version and will be further tested in the next months.
Conclusions: This research underlines the significance of co-design in improving access to information with a contribution to the integration of care, by actively involving adolescents and professionals in remote areas. Indeed, our co-designed webapp serves as a powerful tool to link different disciplines dedicated to adolescents in order to bridge the gap in healthcare access for them in remote areas.
Implications for the Future: This research takes a multidisciplinary approach, incorporating co-design principles and community engagement. As adolescents will be the future, our research contributes to achieving better population health and well-being by addressing the determinants of health and reducing health disparities, especially in remote areas.