Page 70 - Experience Based Co-design - a toolkit for Australia

PATIENT JOURNEY MAPPING
WHAT
A patient journey map is a diagram summarising the service experiences patients have over time.
WHY
You can use patient journey mapping to identify, map and plan patient experiences of services. The tool can be applied to improving patient experiences of health services, specialist units, or encounters with individual staff.
WHEN
Use this tool during the early stages of your co-design work to understand the patient journey and their parallel experiences of services. With stakeholder input, it then becomes a template for identifying key service touchpoints and improvements.
Deciding your approach:
There are two main ways of developing patient journey maps: individual interviews and group sessions:
1. Interviewing individual patients with their families and other supporters:
These will give you the deepest understanding of the patient’s journey and experiences. Interviews are suitable for more in-depth improvement work.
2. Talking to patients with similar conditions or service experiences in groups:
This will give you the best overview of the journey, key experiences and key improvements. This suits full co-design projects where prior work has been done (such as interviews or surveys) or where time and budget are limited.
note: You will need to organise recording methods appropriate to the approach you use. All approaches rely on note-taking by or on behalf of patients, so this needs to be managed carefully by facilitators. Audio or video recording may also be appropriate.
HOW
1. Start your interview or workshop by exploring the patient journey
Do this from the perspective of patients, their families and their other supporters (noting families and supporters have significant journeys of their own).
Elicit patient stories about their journey from the beginning (such as when they first noted symptoms) to the present day.
Ask participants to divide their stories into phases (these can be visualised as sections, chapters or scenes) to help others understand how the journey changes.
Adapted with permission from healthcodesign.org.nz