Experience-based co-design – Integration and Implementation Insights

By Louise Locock

When we’re trying to improve the experience of health care, social care and other services users, is there a fast, rigorous way to include their perspectives that doesn’t involve repeatedly collecting new data from them and their families?

Measuring, understanding and improving people’s experience of services has become a priority. There is now an international focus (at least in the West) on person-centred care. The English National Health Service has led the way among health systems by introducing the first nationally mandated patient survey.

Despite the strong political and organisational focus on improving care, reports of unsatisfactory experience continue in even the best funded care systems.

By Glenn Robert and Annette Boaz

authors_glenn-robert_annette-boaz — 1. Glenn Robert (biography)
2. Annette Boaz (biography)

There is lots of talk about the potential of co-creation as an approach to improving public services, but what does it actually look like (and do) in practice?

We describe one specific approach that has been used extensively for improving the quality of health care services: Experience-based Co-design.

Key Features and Stages

Experience-based Co-design draws on elements of participatory action research, user-centred design, learning theory and narrative-based approaches to change.

The key features of Experience-based Co-design are that it:

places patients at the heart of a quality improvement effort working alongside staff to improve services
maintains a focus on designing experiences (not just systems or processes).

It has six stages.

Stage 1 involves establishing the governance and project management arrangements.

Let’s stop measuring and start improving

Improving health care services through Experience-based Co-design