Training clinical researchers with design thinking to develop dementia caregiving research initiatives

Abstract

Training healthcare professionals with Design Thinking (DT) can support patient-centred care by recognizing patient/care provider needs through empathizing. This article explored the Design Thinking in improving clinical researchers’ understanding of relatively unexplored and understudied dementia caregiving problems. Following the Double-Diamond, a Design Thinking process model, we conducted a series of workshops and invited family caregivers of patients with dementia as active participants to provide training to clinical researchers on Design Thinking. We then evaluated the benefit of the workshops in improving clinical researchers’ understanding of the caregiving problem and solution space through pre- and post-surveys. Our findings revealed researchers’ overall perception of Design Thinking, their clear insights on dementia caregivers’ challenges, and speculating caregiver-specific interventions. Our paper contributed to the health design community by exploring the benefit of Design Thinking in understudied areas by (1) Recognizing urgent matters in healthcare, (2) Revealing implicit needs through collective expertise and knowledge exchange, and (3) Producing original health care research and contributions. We hope this study inspires and supports training healthcare researchers to advance dementia caregiving and healthcare research initiatives by adopting the Double-Diamond process model.