Wenbo Ai
Empowering Design Literacy and Engagement in Health Promoting Hospitals

Health Promoting Hospitals (HPH) are a concept for hospital innovation development, initiated by the WHO and building on the philosophy of health promotion in their Ottawa Charter (WHO, 1986). Hospitals are expected to expand roles to more dynamic social health promotion, shift the hospital culture from treatment-centred to health-centred and create an empowering community setting. The theoretical frame of design thinking at the centre of my research focuses primarily on individual empowerment and has much to offer those leading change in such organisations. Participatory design originated from Scandinavia and would be an appropriate approach to target issues of empowerment, attempting to involve stakeholders, managers, staff, patients, hospitals, health organisations and communities actively, co-creating sustainable structures and innovative organisational cultures. Communication design theory creates communication tools and communication methodologies to target changing behaviour, promoting messages and disseminating information. Key terms such as platforms, transformation and co-creation can usefully and dynamically be re-appropriated to the participatory context. This blending of design theory could offer HPH a new approach.

Most HPH literature focuses on management, capacity building, and evaluations of implications and assessments. Though plenty of research shows the key roles of evidence-based design, user experience design, service and architecture design, and participatory design in healthcare services, hardly any of these come close to touching on HPH studies. In terms of communication theories in healthcare studies, most focus on traditional approaches: these only emphasize verbal communication skills rather than involving communication design methodologies.

This is the important gap my PhD research aims to fill: one of my hypotheses projects hospitals serving as community centres, social and cultural education centres, even sports and fitness centres. This research is using participatory communication design as a frame to enhance the transformational achievements of HPH, using participatory design to empower and encourage patients and communities to design their own methods and run their own “health centred” communities. This practice-led research is appropriate to the strengthening of community action, the reorientation of healthcare services, the redesign of hospital roles, and the contribution to sustainable innovation development and management policy making in a healthcare system. It aims to embed design methods within the transformational processes of HPH.