We have started a quarterly series of healthcare service design workshops at OCADU for stakeholder networks, health providers and health agencies. With an explicit focus on service design and design-led research in healthcare, we hope to raise awareness of the practices and models for service design in clinical and community care settings. Workshop 1 – Inspiring health movements in community networks: Community network innovations Dr. Rick Botelho, Family physician and U Rochester School of Medicine Challenge: How can we mobilize people within their local and extended social networks to socialize health learning and experience to improve population health in the community? Description: We address the problem of community health through the approach known as catalytic innovation, creating lightweight modes of peer learning appropriate for different types of social networks (online, neighborhood, community centres). To overcome the scarcity mindset in healthcare, patients become an integral solution to these complex problems. These peer-driven …
Care as Design Practice
Simplifying a complex set of concepts into a central image. We might conceive a core value of caring as ontological, a mode of existence that human-centred practices may share with medicine, nursing, counseling, social work. This way of being might be central to design as service to society, humanity, and direct clients and stakeholders. And we might recognize that every level of structure endorses care differently. The outcomes of care for persons, as practice, as an organization, or the functions of what we believe to be system level are not coordinated by language or method. Whereas the theory of the (20th century) firm was driven by returns on assets and knowledge that required strategic alignment to achieve cycles of returns – perhaps a 21st century model of organizing for ecologies of care might align these levels of structure to a values of care – including financial sustainability – as a …
What Counts as Evidence in Healthcare Service Design?
Evidence-Based Service Design From Chapter5, Design for Care Inpatients spend most of their time during hospital treatment and recovery in a bed, often in a shared room. It might be obvious to anyone who has even visited a hospital room that the experience of resting and waiting in this sterile, artificial environment could be greatly improved. The everyday experience of the inpatient constitutes encounters with the physical environment—from building architecture to room layout and furniture—and the presentation of services within a hospital and specialized clinics. Most of these environments leave a lot to be desired, and designed. What if it could be proven that people heal demonstrably faster and better in beautiful, well cared for physical environments? Architecture professor Roger Ulrich’s research into the direct beneficial health effects of natural and harmonious surroundings during care provides hard evidence to support this theory. Ulrich’s 1983 article “View Through a Window May …
MISC Magazine Interview
Interview with Dr. Peter Jones Thanks to Dustin Johnston-Jewell, Strategic Foresighter at Idea Couture and SFI MDes grad student, for the terrific interview and publication in IC’s MISC magazine. While MISC is Idea Couture’s own curated and published magazine, it has very high design values and a good range of authors, from within the fast-growing Toronto innovation firm and from outside. It extends their thought leadership by putting a printed and online journal on the street where they can curate a huge volume of ideas while scanning and managing trends. I was happy to do the 90 minute interview with Dustin, who edited and wrote much of it for the online MISC (and a shorter version in print if you’re lucky enough to get the exclusive journal). A brief excerpt follows: With the advent of biotechnology, genomics, and human-centric patient care, the healthcare industry is going through an era of …
