Authors:

Abstract

Introduction

How do we elicit our community's thoughts and ideas about the design of medical education? How

has the pandemic shifted our learning experience for teachers, residents, and patients? Our

versatility, adaptation, and ability to fail fast and forward have emerged as important traits in this

quickly changing landscape. In this session, we will address these questions and experiment

through the design thinking paradigm.

Aims Objectives Theory or Methods

Design thinking, a method of co-evolution of problem and solution, has gained traction in

healthcare and medical education as a way to promote a greater understanding of users’

experience and to help unpack the challenges and opportunities that we are confronting in our

educational journey and delivery of care. Teams are guided through five highly collaborative phases

of user empathy, defining the problem, ideation, prototyping, and testing.

Highlights or Results or Key Findings

The ultimate goal is to create a product that can be implemented by team members. We will provide

examples of how design thinking has been used within UBC’s Department of Family Practice to

rethink our curriculum and develop meaningful relationships with our surrounding healthcare

community.

Conclusions

Design thinking provided the opportunity for our faculty, administration, and students to voice their

concerns and more importantly create solutions that address their environment’s contextual and

temporal constraints and affordances. Participants of our design thinking sessions described the

experience as highly collaborative and thought-provoking. Furthermore, during COVID-19

pandemic, this paradigm

Implications for applicability/transferability sustainability and limitations

The design thinking paradigm is one that can be easily transferred to any setting where participants

are open to new ideas and thoughts about the challenges and opportunities presented.