Designing service improvement
In the UCHD project, we adopted a participatory design approach called Experience Based Design (EBD) for our outpatients project – BOSOP .
EBD begins by gathering and sharing the experiences of patients and healthcare providers. We work with patients and providers, and use stories to help each of us understand patients’ journeys through the healthcare system. As a group of designers, patients and healthcare professionals, we try to understand the emotional highs and lows of patients’ experiences. And we use all of this to look at how things might be changed for the better.
Developing new ideas in this way is just one of our challenges. Another is to get staff and managers to come on board with them. We keep in mind the implications for the way people do their jobs. We have to remember that to improve the system, we need the people who work for the NHS to be happy with any changes and play a full part in achieving them. That’s why we involve NHS professionals as well as patients in the design process.
Typically research in the NHS is concerned with evaluating the effectiveness of treatments, and research initiatives in the NHS are subject to ethical review. The advantage of EBD is that because the approach is approved by the NHS Institute, and is a ‘service improvement’ technique, rather than treatment, there is no need to go through the complex ethics process that safeguards other types of research.
This means that NHS staff can pick up the approach and use it with local approval only.
