Beyond tokenistic participation: Using representational artefacts to enable meaningful public participation in health service design

Cecily Morrison and Andy Dearden

Health Policy, 2013, vol. 112, issue 3, 179-186

Abstract: A number of recent policies promote public participation in health service design. Yet, a growing literature has articulated a gap between policy aims and actual practice resulting in public participation becoming tokenistic. Drawing on theory from participatory design, we argue that choosing appropriate artefacts to act as representations can structure discussions between public participants and health professionals in ways that both groups find meaningful and valid. Through a case study of a service improvement project in outpatient services for older people, we describe three representational artefacts: emotion maps, stories, and tracing paper, and explain how they helped to mediate interactions between public participants and health professionals. We suggest that using such representational artefacts can provide an alternative approach to participation that stands in contrast to the current focus on the professionalisation of public participants. We conclude that including participatory designers in projects, to chose or design appropriate representational artefacts, can help to address the policy–practice gap of including public participants in health service design.

Keywords: Public participation (PPI); Participatory design; Representational artefacts; Older people; Health services (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168851013001334
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:hepoli:v:112:y:2013:i:3:p:179-186

DOI: 10.1016/j.healthpol.2013.05.008

Access Statistics for this article

Health Policy is currently edited by Katrien Kesteloot, Mia Defever and Irina Cleemput

More articles in Health Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu () and ().