User-Centred Healthcare Design (UCHD)

In the old days the term ‘patient’ when used in connection with health services, can appear aptly ambiguous. Patience seemed to be an important virtue in one’s encounters with the medical profession. It went with other virtues such as sufferance, endurance and forbearance that are so important when one is the passive recipient of both a condition and its treatment. But today, people who use healthcare services can defy such objectification and passification. They can be more like consumers. They have already searched the web to find out what is wrong with them and what can be done. They demand value for money and choice and have a view on the equality of service they receive. The health service of today ‘sees the person in the patient’, recognises the ‘expert patient’ and understands the journey through illness as not only physical but emotional. So how can we bring NHS patients and staff together to share their experiences and how can we help them to work together to ‘co-design’ the healthcare services of the future?

User-centred Healthcare Design (UCHD) brings together patients, healthcare staff, families and communities to explore and understand the real-life experience of care provision, and use that knowledge to drive innovation and improvement in healthcare service design and delivery.

Current practices in service development and delivery across South Yorkshire will be mapped and, through a process of action research and co-design, an understanding of users’ experiences of health-care will be used to drive innovative solutions in service design.

The theme will proceed by a series of co-design case studies focussing on chronic conditions, particularly those being studied in the CLAHRC. Through a process of participatory design and applying new technologies and new service design thinking, the team will develop and demonstrate a robust participatory approach to user-centred innovation for health services.

The first case study based in the Royal Hallamshire Hospital began in March 2009 and is called Better Outpatient Services for Older People (BOSOP). The BOSOP case study is evaluating the Experience-Based Design (EBD) approach developed by the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement. The second case study is a collaboration with the Diabetes Theme and will explore the role of digital media in helping teenagers with their self management of diabetes. Like BOSOP it will take a participatory design approach involving young people with diabetes, healthcare professionals, and carers at all stages of the design process.

Find out more about this project and how it progresses via a dedicated website at http://www.uchd.org.uk/.