Abstract
Background: Consumer involvement in healthcare co-design advances health services that better meet the needs of those individuals. Methods to facilitate involvement of consumers where they can most meaningfully impact service co-design are still developing. In health, personas are hypothetical representations of individuals that help to establish an understanding of the perspectives and experiences of a stakeholder group. These fictional profiles can be used as an innovative and creative participatory method.
Approach: We completed a scoping review to identify the key characteristics of the use of personas to involve consumers in healthcare co-design. A total of 1,548 articles were screened, and 29 studies that met the selection criteria were included in the review. Personas have been used to involve consumers across all co-design processes: identify (1); analyse (29); define (26); and design (8). Personas were reported to be both an effective tool to promote a user-centred approach in co-design and a valuable participatory method. The main limitations of personas are that they are resource-intensive and may be biased or unauthentic. Personas have been used to represent and involve priority populations in co-design studies although religion, race/ethnicity, socio-economic position and education are not often considered.
We will use persona dyads as a tool to bring patients with lived experience of mental illness together with providers to create Emergency Department (ED) improvements in co-design workshops. Persona dyads will be constructed using: results from the scoping review; data collected in ethnographic observations of EDs; interviews with patients, ED staff and epistemic experts about ED care for people presenting with mental illness; and patient and provider persona design interviews.
Results: Co-design workshops will be held in March and April 2025. We will present the persona dyads (patient/provider) created for the co-design sessions.
Implications: We anticipate persona dyads will facilitate a rich and creative approach to health services co-design, ensuring the experience of care providers and recipients is explicit and forefront when creating ED improvements. We expect that persona dyads will assist in reducing the power imbalance between patients and providers in the co-design workshop because both groups will be the focus of discussion via the developed dyads.
Insights gained from this research will contribute to improved understanding of the value of personas as a co-design tool. Documenting the process to design the persona dyads will contribute new knowledge on effective and inclusive consumer involvement practices in health service co-design.
We speculate that personas can be a translatable and enduring resource. We will make the persona dyads available for adaptation, which may assist project teams employing accelerated co-design methods in other settings.