Co-designing co-design. Shifting the culture of practice in healthcare

Abstract

To date design applied in the context of health care has generally focused on the design of products. This paper describes a project ‘frailsafe’ and suggests that in the future design will play a new and increasingly important role in shifting the culture and the way that particular practices in health are performed. frailsafe is a project that aims to improve measured quality of care for frail older patients admitted to NHS hospitals with medical emergencies. The project provided a platform for multidisciplinary working and enhanced communication on what constitutes good care for older patients. The research exemplified the concept of ‘all teach, all learn’ where the design team engaged in the co-development with the frailsafe network of effective prototypes of frailsafe. Ultimately the objective was to empower hospital improvement teams to adopt a co-design culture for creative local implementation of frailsafe.