Abstract
<h3>Key Messages</h3> Design as a practice is well placed to address the need to innovate faster, improve collaboration, and scale solutions while considering the way people live their daily lives across the world. Design for Health views design as a craft and a discipline that applies a specific mindset and skillset to a creative problem-solving process. The unique value of design in global health can be understood through 3 advantages: framing—identifying the right problems to solve; intention—creating space to solve problems the right way; and collaboration—continually engaging communities and organizations as actual partners. A comparison of design to other common problem-solving approaches in global health illustrates key differences but also offers opportunities to integrate design with approaches such as participatory research, quality improvement, and sociobehavioral research. To tackle complex challenges like the ones global health faces, there is a need for public health products, programs, and interventions to better meet the needs of communities. In the toolbox of approaches to global health innovation, design is essential.
Highlights
The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has revealed a few truths about global health: the speed of innovation needs to improve; we need to work more effectively across silos; and we need to understand that global challenges require solutions that take into account local cultures, social systems, and structures for them to be truly successful
In 1977, when the World Health Organization published its first essential drugs list,*38 known as the Essential Medicines List (EML) with 212 medicines, it was hailed as a peaceful revolution in international public health.[39]
The EML includes 460 medicines and 80% of countries have a national essential medicines list based on the WHO EML
Summary
The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has revealed a few truths about global health: the speed of innovation needs to improve; we need to work more effectively across silos; and we need to understand that global challenges require solutions that take into account local cultures, social systems, and structures for them to be truly successful. There have been unprecedented leaps in biomedical innovation, with drug and vaccine development.[1] Despite challenges related to prevention and equitable access to resources, this pandemic has illustrated the capabilities of new innovation ecosystems, notably open innovation involving “purposive knowledge flows across organizational boundaries.”[2]. The pandemic has unlocked new ways of collaborating and has exposed longstanding inequities in societies. Both of these are a part of our working reality. This is an opportunity to radically rethink how we work in global public health, bringing with it the possibility to consider the role of design in this future world (Box 1).[3]
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