Experience-based Co-Design Program 2 Stage 1 Evaluation Report: Final Report to Health Services Performance Improvement Branch, NSW Health

This report presents our Evaluation of Program 2 Stage 1 of the NSW Health Experience-based Co-design project. This Evaluation was conducted following the Evaluation of Co-design Program 1 Stage 1 (Iedema, Merrick, Piper & Walsh 2008), and complements the Evaluation just published about Program 1 Stage 2 (Piper, Iedema, Merrick 2010). Data for this Evaluation were derived from the following four sources: Co-design documentation provided by the 4 sites, interviews with 48 key informants, performance data about Emergency Departments, including the 2009 NSW Health site specific, Area and State level Patient Survey Reports, and the policy and academic literature on Co-design. This Evaluation revealed that the Program 2 Stage 1 Co-design sites produced benefits and faced challenges similar to the Program 1 Co-design sites. Common challenges related to staff turnover, supporting project staff, involving and communicating with front-line staff, and recruiting consumers. Common benefits included Co-design enabling staff to reflect upon and improve their work practices and facilitating on-going and deliberative consumer involvement, as was evident in our first Co-design Evaluation (Iedema, Merrick, Piper & Walsh 2008). This consistency in benefits and challenges across sites highlights the applicability of the recommendations made in the Evaluation of Program 1 Stage 1 Co-design to the Program 2 sites. Accordingly, the recommendations presented in the current Evaluation do not duplicate the recommendations made in our previous Evaluation. Rather, we present six additional recommendations for consideration by NSW Health.