Improving admission through patient and professional experiences: adapting experience based co-design in an emergency service

This paper participates in documenting the use of Experience Based Co-Design (EBCD) in the case of patient admissions to an emergency service. We explain how we adapted the EBCD process to our particular context, by multiplying the means to gather experiences of patients, families and professionals; by using mixed representations; and by iteratively co-designing and testing interventions with stakeholders. The issues we identified are related to autonomy, information, flows, spaces, privacy and confidentiality; the resulting interventions deal with the redefinition of emergency waiting areas through the following: a real-time notification system for care pathways and the reorganization of patient admission by separating pathways. These results show the effectiveness of the approach in improving emergency care services, particularly patient admission. The enhancements we propose to overcome the challenges related to EBCD both show the adaptability of the method, and may prove useful beyond emergency contexts.