Digital Health & Care Institute (DHI) (2013-ongoing)
The DHI is an Innovation Centre which supports transformational collaboration between universities and businesses. Operated as a partnership between Glasgow School of Art and the University of Strathclyde, the DHI aims to create opportunities to connect academics with designers, healthcare providers, SMEs, charities and other key stakeholders. It focuses on improving the provision of health and care in Scotland.
Researchers at the Innovation School work on developing new service models, delivery pathways and digital solutions intended to change the way health and care is delivered in Scotland. A participatory design approach provides the foundation for a diverse portfolio of projects based on real-life experiences, each using co-design methodologies to identify opportunities for future improvement.
https://futurehealthandwellbeing.org
DHI projects included in this resource:
- The Modern Outpatient: A person-centred vision of care for people living with long-term conditions
- Ritual Respect: co-designing care and emotional support around miscarriage
- Backpack: person-owned health and care data store
Related publication: Learning Based Innovation: evaluating design-lead approaches to research and innovation. Jay Bradley, Ute Schauberger
Keywords: digital, health & care, wellbeing, innovation centre, creative collaboration, innovation design, design research
Contributed by: Cate Green, Glasgow School of Art, The Innovation School
The Modern Outpatient: A person-centred vision of care for people living with long-term conditions
Our current way of organising care requires people living with multiple conditions to attend many different appointments. This impacts negatively on their lives and can be very tiring. It also represents an inefficient use of NHS resources. This project asked the questions:
- How could our health system be organized around the person living with multiple long-term conditions rather than around individual conditions?
- How would this change their experience of care?
Our objectives were:
- To understand the current challenge, specifically:
- To generate ideas for new ways of working to support people living with multiple long-term conditions:
- To distill the insights and ideas generated into a roadmap for the development of person-centred models of care, supported by new digital tools.
The design team are now exploring how the ideas generated through this project can be taken forward in the DHI ‘Future of Care’ project. Essential to this process will be the meaningful involvement of people living with long-term conditions and NHS and social care staff to ensure the resulting resources meet the needs of the different users and stakeholders. Early and iterative prototyping will be used to translate the design concepts into tangible forms that can be tested and refined by the intended users to understand how they might support self management, service delivery and positive experiences of care.
Keywords: long-term conditions, person-centred care, digital tools, self-management, co-design
Contributed by: Gemma Teal, Cate Green, Glasgow School of Art, The Innovation School
Ritual Respect: co-designing care and emotional support around miscarriage
Miscarriage is sadly the most common type of complication associated with early pregnancy, with approximately one in four pregnancies ending in miscarriage. For each woman the experience is different, and access to the right information and emotional support at the right time is crucial to enable them to cope with their loss. However, ongoing emotional support provision for women following miscarriage that meets individual needs is notably lacking, which for many can result in enduring negative effects on their health, relationships, and future pregnancies. This gap in healthcare provision also has wider implications for NHS services, capacity and resources in the long run.
This participatory design project aimed to support health professionals, and empower and equip women to improve their emotional wellbeing following miscarriage. We took a person-centred perspective thoughout.
Analysis of the Lab outcomes (i.e, the conversations, maps, artefacts and concept prototypes) offered rich insights around: women’s experiences of miscarriage and scenarios of accessing care; current care pathway capturing key stages and experiences from the perspective of health professionals and women; qualities of preferable care; and concepts for a preferable model of future care focused on the emotional care journey.
Keywords: miscarriage, participatory design, emotional wellbeing, person-centred, emotional care journey
Contributed by: Sneha Raman, Angela Tulloch, Glasgow School of Art, The Innovation School
Backpack: person-owned health and care data store
What if all your personal records, including your relevant personal health and care records were held in one place that you control?
It was suggested that this personal data store, which we have called a ‘Backpack’, could make it easier to access health and care services, and support services to be centred around the wishes and needs of the person.
Design researchers from The Innovation School at The Glasgow School of Art worked together with a community interest company (Mydex CIC) and a health professional (Dr. Jamie Hogg, NHS Grampian) to explore and develop the Backpack idea with people living with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and with health and social care staff. People living with MS were identified as highly knowledgeable co-design participants, due to the complex and progressive nature of the condition, requiring many different interactions with public services.
The aims of the project were to explore how people living with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) would like to manage their personal information in order to improve the experience of accessing services, and understand the potential of the Backpack to support health and care professionals to deliver more integrated and person-centred care.
Keywords: health and care data, person-centred care, personalisation, multiple sclerosis, co-design
Contributed by: Gemma Teal, Jay Bradley, Tara French, Glasgow School of Art, The Innovation School