Using Co-Design to Develop a Collective Leadership Intervention for Healthcare Teams to Improve Safety Culture

• Main Authors: Marie E. Ward, Aoife De Brún, Deirdre Beirne, Clare Conway, Una Cunningham, Alan English, John Fitzsimons, Eileen Furlong, Yvonne Kane, Alan Kelly, Sinéad McDonnell, Sinead McGinley, Brenda Monaghan, Ann Myler, Emer Nolan, Róisín O’Donovan, Marie O’Shea, Arwa Shuhaiber, Eilish McAuliffe
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2018-06-01
• Series: International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
• Subjects: co-design; co-production; collective leadership; team performance; safety culture
• Online Access: http://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/15/6/1182

While co-design methods are becoming more popular in healthcare; there is a gap within the peer-reviewed literature on how to do co-design in practice. This paper addresses this gap by delineating the approach taken in the co-design of a collective leadership intervention to improve healthcare team performance and patient safety culture. Over the course of six workshops healthcare staff, patient representatives and advocates, and health systems researchers collaboratively co-designed the intervention. The inputs to the process, exercises and activities that took place during the workshops and the outputs of the workshops are described. The co-design method, while challenging at times, had many benefits including grounding the intervention in the real-world experiences of healthcare teams. Implications of the method for health systems research are discussed.