Empowering Healthcare Specialists to take a
Co-Design approach in their work
Project Type:
Co-Design Training
Partners:
Merri Health
Location:
Melbourne, Victoria. Australia
As a not-for-profit community health provider, Merri Health are committed to creating and supporting healthy and connected communities, and understand that the voice of their consumers is essential to ensure that they are meeting their needs. They engaged us to undertake a capacity building project that educates staff and promotes co-design in the context of their existing Consumer Engagement program. It was important that the program was practical and relevant for their healthcare specialists, to empower them to apply these methods to their day to day work.
Approach
First we worked with Merri Heath to ensure that this program would complement their consumer engagement initiatives by building understanding of the existing strategy, structures and supports in place.
Then an on-line program was developed to incorporate Co-Design, Consumer Engagement & Design Thinking into the context of their work and existing frameworks.
With a program now developed, we delivered 2 x half day interactive sessions with 20 participants. Starting with a video from the CEO on why engaging with consumers is important to Merri Health's strategy and ambitions as an organisation. We then linked Co-design to their existing frameworks and strategies to ensure all participants understood how it fit into the bigger picture. We then ran through the different steps of the Co-design process, and after each step, checking in for understanding, answering questions and ensuring participants had a chance to share how what they learnt could be applied to their work.
We provided each participant with a workbook especially branded for Merri Health, that was the recipe for running a Co-design project. This empowered the participants to apply what they learnt beyond the training sessions and has become a key artefact on the Merri Health intranet for their staff to use.
Outcomes
40 Merri Health employees have now completed the program with 100% of those participants confident that they will be able to use what they learnt in their work. Such as;
- Using the workbook and what was learnt to guide the co-design processes
- Making changes to how they engage with consumers and how to identify and phrase problems
- Applying what was learnt to the planning and facilitation of projects