6 resources for Patient Centred experience and Design (EBD)

Ensuring "involving patients" is more than rhetoric is a challenge. For any healthcare project, be it an innovation or an attempt to spread good practice and adapt evidence to work locally, engaging with patients and service users is a challenge.  This post suggest five resources to help you.


1. The Picker Institute Europe is a world leader in working with patients on a large scale and covering public, private and the voluntary sector.  Their remit is to work with healthcare providers and commissioners to:

• measure patient experience
• gather patient feedback
• analyse the findings
• develop action plans
• engage patients in service improvement
• evaluate improvements and
• communicate developments back to your Board and stakeholders.

Available from their website is a comprehensive toolkit for Using Patient Experience. It is free.

2. The USA based Institute for Patient Centred Design is unique in that it provides resources on design not only for healthcare professionals but also to patients; excellent way of practising what they preach! They have a number of documents and surveys (free) available online.

3. The Centre for Health Design has an evidence based focus. They have a number of evidence based design resources on their website and their Healthcare Leadership portal has excellent PDFs for download and access to a variety of multimedia resources. This includes an excellent review on the literature of evidence based design These are free.

4. The NHS Institute which covers the NHS in England, has a toolkit on Evidence Based Design which is available to NHS England staff (max 20 copies) for free, and £30 for copies for others. They also have a facilitator's pack available for purchase.

5. The UK Department of Health has published a toolkit on understanding detailed patient experience data. Although this does not cover design and involvement in depth it is a useful kit to help you understand what to do with the data you are presented with. 

6. The Design Council in the UK is running a project about Designing for Patient Dignity. While most of this covers the physical aspects of patient care, the case studies and design process make for interesting reading. They have published a 25 page booklet which is free to download. 

If you have any favourites I've not covered here then please leave your notes and a link in the comments on this blog.