Community Co-Design for Street Medicine
Background
Funded through Innovate Carolina’s Translating Innovative Ideas for the Public Good Award, “Community Co-Design for Street Medicine” was a partnership between Design and Innovation for the Public Good, Researchers at Gillings School of Global Public Health, and Practitioners in Burke County NC to develop a primary care intervention for people experiencing homelessness in the mountains. Following a surge in homelessness after the pandemic, primary care initiatives were not meeting the needs of residents of the county and an initial backpack medicine model was developed and implemented. While well-received by the community, the model was not sustainable or scalable. In order to meet the needs of residents in the community and scale the model a human-centered design process was implemented over one-year to develop and pilot a mobile health model.
Approach
Provided human-centered design expertise to 1) develop a local design team, inclusive of people experiencing homelessness, and 2) identify, prototype, and test service model components and implementation strategies to support the co-design of a street medicine program in Burke County, NC.
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Initial planning meeting to validate stakeholders, establish objectives and discuss approach. Multi-day site visit to Burke County to meet people with lived experience, service providers, and community partners. Completion of brainstorming activities with design team in Burke County.
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Following initial site visits and brainstorming activities, the design team met to develop focus group protocols to engage service providers and community partners in Burke County. Focus groups were carried out with 20+ stakeholders over 3 days. Insights generated formed the initial concepts to prototype.
The design team met in Chapel Hill to prototype and test two concepts: backpack medicine and a mobile health unit.
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The team returned to Burke county and re-engaged stakeholders to iterate the concepts and brainstorm organizational structure and staffing models.
The iterated prototype was then presented to people with lived experience for feedback.
Impacts and Outcomes
Two concepts were prototyped for testing with community members; a backpack medicine intervention and a mobile health intervention. Both were explored from the perspectives of individuals experiencing substance use disorders and women specifically. We discovered critical gaps in accessible women’s healthcare in both current primary care offerings for this group and past versions of backpack medicine.
Based on feedback from community partners and gender-specific focus groups with individuals experiencing homelessness, a pilot program was developed for women in Burke County. The mobile health pilot will run for 6 weeks and offer women’s primary care every second week with a rotating provider structure.