Healthcare professionals designing person-centered healthcare services

Abstract

This thesis is based on the project Chronically Engaged 2.0 (CE2.0). CE2.0 was a project part of the County council of Sörmland strategic initative to transition the healthcare system regionally towards a more person-centered healthcare. CE2.0 had an unusual setup when designing new healthcare services. In the project service staff at primary care centers (nurses, nurses aids, and medical doctors) became active participants and were trained to conduct the development work themselves with a service design approach. An experienced project management team in person-centered care and in conducting development projects within healthcare using service design supervised and guided the four teams. The aim of this thesis is to bring insight into the following: • How successful are unexperienced healthcare staff in designing person centered healthcare services? • What enabled, motivated and also inhibited the teams when tasked with designing person-centered healthcare services? It also aims to develop a support for healthcare professionals unexperienced in designing person-centered healthcare services that enables them to be better supported in designing person-centered healthcare services. The thesis is conducted in line with technical action research and builds upon the design expert experience and reflections during the project and data from notes from different type of meetings during the project, videos and images, and different project documents that were produced by the teams and PMT. The thesis also explores the connection between person-centered care and service dominant logic and designs a support for future project attempting to conduct similar projects as CE2.0. The thesis found by reviewing the teams work and concepts that all teams have made different levels of incremental shifts towards a more person-centered healthcare services. Only by including the change in mindset that occurred amongst the teams a larger transition towards a more person-centered care could be argued. However, further studies are required. The thesis also stated that the project management team including the design expert influence on the teams work were limited to change in mindset. The activities that had greatest impact were the activities that involved patients and allowed the teams to create a closer relationship with the patients. By involving patients something simple as a quote could inspire to new insights and ideas that could radically change how to deliver a service. Involving patients not only created better insight into the needs of the patients and what could create value, it also strengthened the teams’ self-confidence and empowered them in their ordinary work. This also reduced the challenge of collecting data about patients’ experiences and needs that occurred in the project. The thesis also found other several success and inhibiting factors but could not validate their significance in term of project outcome and commonality which was not within thesis scope. The thesis created a guidebook for the design of person-centered healthcare services which is rather unique in comparison to similar sources and supports. It democratize who is allowed to conduct development projects within healthcare, allowing more professions to initiate and conduct development projects themselves. Its purpose is to be open source, be used in combination with other toolkits and empowers users to review and build upon its content, making it their own guide. However, since it has not been tested in its current design it needs to be publicized, tested and reviewed by other individuals engaged in developing healthcare services.