Building teams and identifying co-design stakeholders in healthcare projects: A social prescription case study

Although co-design literature promotes the involvement of multiple stakeholder groups, it is not always clear who such stakeholders should be within innovative service development. Social prescription is a new concept in Europe aiming for a more holistic health approach to increase social integration of members into the community. Through our feasibility study on introducing social prescription in Australia, we found an iterative and staged approach is necessary to understand who to involve in social prescription services. We conducted qualitative research consisting of semi-structured interviews and four co-design workshops. This way it was possible to understand who to involve in the next round of data collection on how to apply this novel concept and make the most of existing staff and resources, thus overcoming organisational barriers in the existing service landscape of our collaboration partner. We recognised the usefulness in adopting a process that presents information visually to a wide audience to identify new stakeholders and potential client groups. We placed particular emphasis on the health provider’s values and needs as well as those of their clients. This article concludes with a summary of how we achieved this in our specific living lab project and includes recommendations we believe are of value for other complex projects in the community health sector, too.