Integrating Human-Centred Design into the Public Healthcare Sector
Public health challenges require individuals, communities, and cross-sector stakeholders of society to co-create changes. Design thinking can help us to arrive at better innovative solutions by framing problems more precisely and expanding the public healthcare sector’s innovation capability with new methods and inspirations.
In a partnership since 2017, IDK again collaborated with CUHK Jockey Club School of Public Health and Primary Care to host a 1-day design thinking workshop for its Health System Leadership Programme. In this workshop, medical professionals from both the public and private sectors discussed how design thinking can help Hong Kong rethink methods to protect its citizens from infection.
Participants were divided into groups and introduced to four distinct personas, and were challenged to bring innovation to tackle citizens' vaccine hesitancy in a fictional pandemic scenario. During the interactive exercises, participants were encouraged to take an empathetic approach to dig deep and look at innovation opportunities from a personal, communal, and systemic perspective.
They drew inspiration from deep understandings of the persona's hopes, fears, and routines, developing their own solutions and presenting them in role-plays, demonstrating potentials for re-designing the health care system from a human-centred perspective.
