Berit Godfroij, Lenny van Onselen, Marike Boonzaaijer, and Anita Cremers
In healthcare, there is a gap between research and practice, which asks for a more interdisciplinary and collaborative approach for healthcare innovation. Co-design, as a systemic and collaborative approach, helps bridge this gap between research and practice. It has become a popular approach in healthcare for developing therapeutic interventions, including for paediatric therapy. Healthcare systems are becoming increasingly complex, and systemic design offers methods, practices, and processes to address this. Systems thinking can help us understand complexity and apply that understanding to designing and evaluating interventions that improve health. Designers and health researchers from research and practice increasingly work together with overlapping aims but different vocabularies, frameworks, and ways of knowing. This study investigates such a collaboration in a single case (PEBBLES) on co-designing paediatric healthcare interventions in a Living Lab research project. Paediatric physiotherapy has historically been child-focused; only in recent years has there been more attention to parent- and family-centred care. This requires a different set of competencies for paediatric physiotherapists. Co-design offers many tools and techniques to involve parents and paediatric therapists in developing and adapting physiotherapy treatment for babies. In PEBBLES, researchers with backgrounds in physiotherapy and in design collaborated with a design practice partner and eleven practice partners employed at small and medium-sized physiotherapy practices in the Netherlands. We investigated how paediatric physiotherapists (in research and practice) learn and practice co-design by participating in co-design activities of this research project. Co-design involves informal mutual learning, without hierarchical relationships, and professionals learn and adapt working modes during co-design activities to develop design ability. Previous research on design ability mostly focuses on an educational setting with a teacher-student relationship. This study examines a two-and-a-half years collaboration between professionals in paediatric physiotherapy and design and develops an initial model of how healthcare professionals develop design ability through co-design activities. We build on previous work in which we identified eight mode-shift practices related to systemic design in a healthcare context.
Keywords: co-design, systemic design, paediatric physiotherapists, design ability, learning, practice