Design thinking workshop

Explore the resources we’ve collated to support our AMEE pre-conference workshop (#PCW1) Design thinking in healthcare professional education.

Workshop Presenters: John Sandars, Postgraduate Medical Institute, Edge Hill University, UK; Natalie Lafferty, Centre for Technology & Innovation in Learning, University of Dundee, UK and Rakesh Patel, University of Nottingham, UK

Effective responses to complex problems in health and healthcare professional education require creative and innovative solutions. Design thinking provides a proven and systematic collaborative approach that can be practically applied across undergraduate and postgraduate education for curriculum development and to augment a variety of teaching and learning experiences. Engaging in design thinking enhances the transferable skills of participants, with implications for design based education. Design thinking is also a key component of design based research.

Introduction

To kick off the workshop we’ll introduce ourselves and provide a brief overview of design thinking. This workshop is designed to give participants an opportunity to to apply design thinking approaches to a medical education challenge. In this first session of the day we’ll begin to consider what the key challenges in medical and healthcare…

Defining the challenge

In essence, design based thinking is a human-centred approach to design that draws on design toolkits to solve problems. It’s an iterative approach typically presented in a step wise process. In practice the steps can occur simultaneously and often involve moving backwards and forwards through the process. The key steps/stages of design thinking include defining the…

Discovery

Having defined the problems and challenges to work on, the next step is to frame the challenge and discover more about it. In this stage your group can start to think about who are the key stakeholders affected by and involved in the problem, what resources are available, what research or user data might tell…

Generating Ideas

The final step in the process covered in the workshop focussed on generating ideas for potential solutions to the challenges and problems that each group worked on. Creativity is central to this phase and it’s critical to ensure that the groups are seen as a safe space where multiple ideas can be shared and no…

Additional resources

If you do a web search for design thinking you’ll come across lots of useful resources. We’ve listed some of the resources that we referred to in the development of this workshop. Policy Lab in a Day – Design thinking is an approach that takes time, in this workshop we attempted a adopt some of…

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