Applying Service Design to Caregiver Education in the Indian Public Health Sector: Lessons and Challenges

Increasingly, service design is applied within the public health domain but resources that illustrate this process in detail are lacking. Although the private sector provides inspiration, it is not always relevant for public health. Noora Health is one such organization that strives to apply systemic service design within the public health sector for caregiver education across South and Southeast Asia. The organization’s Care Companion Program (CCP) converts hospital waiting areas and wards into classrooms filled with artifacts for learning. Service design is applied with behavior change and co-design principles to create such classrooms and create a cohesive, seamless experience for patients, caregivers, and healthcare workers. The chapter will illustrate how service design set the stage for the development of a user-centric health education program for family caregivers, with a focus on General Medicine & Surgery patients, at 64 hospitals across Punjab, India. It will touch upon “service continuity” through a simple, digital intervention that answers questions once families return home from the hospital. Throughout the initial stages of program development and delivery, service design ensures the service is well understood and communicated. It helps translate the program vision into reality by factoring constraints within the public health system and providing alternate pathways for backstage delivery. Guided by this example, the chapter will walk the reader through a set of actionable service design and behavior change mindsets, methods, and principles that anyone using service design in public health can adopt. Finally, we plan to cover questions and considerations relevant for practitioners considering such approaches.