Pervasive healthcare in lived experience: Thinking beyond the home

The National Health Service (NHS) in the UK, like many other public health services worldwide, is facing a number of key challenges. Among them are an ageing population and a rising incidence of chronic health conditions. This situation requires a radical re-examination of how people manage their health and their healthcare in ways that challenge the relationship between people and healthcare services. Combining this observation with the opportunities afforded by pervasive information and communication technologies, we argue that design research should reach beyond simply locating devices and services to offer healthcare `in the home´ and should examine this broader agenda. Rather than focussing design discourse on the specifics of one location, we should adopt a holistic view, beginning from people´s lived experience. In this position paper we describe the User-Centred Healthcare Design (UCHD) project, 5-year collaboration between universities and NHS Trusts in South Yorkshire, UK. We suggest that new models of healthcare that re-define the institutional and social context of care are required if we are to meet the challenge of chronic illness. We describe our progress to date on the UCHD project, our commitment to placing patient experience at the centre of design, and our initial experiences of using an experience-based co-design method to improve outpatient services in a Sheffield hospital.