When my client stepped into her new role to deliver a health promotion program for South Asians, she had no idea how difficult or complex it would be. In just a few weeks, she discovered that the program, along with its underlying systems and culture, was doomed to fail. Rife with inequity, it didn't address the real problems her S. Asian culture faced.
I worked with her for three years to help her turn the program inside out to adopt a patient-centred approach and relaunch it as a health innovation lab. Through this work, she learned to use tools like design thinking and rapid prototyping to reinvent health promotion.
By tapping into her own cultural expertise and that of her community, she and her team delivered dozens of interventions that combined to reduce sugar consumption among patients by 30% and increase demand for educational services by 45%. Their methods were also noticed and picked up by the international health community which has struggled to improve S. Asian health outcomes for decades. Plus, discovering the power of co-creative, iterative, user-centred design changed the way my client approaches system and culture change, for good.
