Using Co-Design Methods to Develop a Patient Monitoring System in Hospital Emergency Care to Support Patient Safety

Efforts have been made to develop a collaborative model to engage healthcare professionals and patients in healthcare services and resources improvement (Neves et al. 2021) This paper aims to understand how a collaborative model can enhance how design researchers work with healthcare communities in Portugal. Within relation to the development of a patient monitoring system to support patient safety for hospitalised people, this paper reports how design researchers are collaborating with the more traditional healthcare support specialisms in the research team. The design researchers are introducing methods and tools to involve all key stakeholders (i.e., nurses, doctors and patient and public representatives) in the design of the new patient monitoring system, which involves the continuous monitoring of vital signs for early detection of clinical deterioration to ensure patient safety in emergency care at the hospital. Specifically, through the nature of co-design workshops and the use of participative tools, these approaches are intended to better empower patients and healthcare professionals in this co-development process, to allow them to mediate the decision-making process in this context. This paper presents the first phase of this co-development process, highlighting the importance of using a participatory co-design approach to enable healthcare professionals and patients to voice their issues when developing a patient monitoring system.