Exploring Clinical Healthcare Challenges and Solutions Through a Design Thinking Education Program for Senior Health Professionals

The purpose of this chapter is to reflect on the value of teaching clinicians a design thinking human-centred process through exploring the challenges/issues/problems from their own practice settings, developing their collaborative prototyping mindset, and generating and testing new solutions. This chapter focuses on an introductory program for health professionals to increase their awareness of the benefits of engaging in the design thinking process and new ways of thinking, doing, and working, to address health service quality improvement issues. Using insights from their patients’ experiences, clinicians worked with their colleagues and designers in a half-day workshop to co-design, prototype and test some potential solutions to their patients’ health-related problems. These workshops were supported by an online program of five modules introducing further useful tools for implementing design thinking in healthcare settings during the five phases of the design process, and a recorded discussion capturing reflections of members of the QUT HEAL Design Lab and their experiences working with clinicians. Team reflections as well as recommendations for future educational interventions and implications for designers working with medical professionals are discussed.