‘Culture for Innovation’ Winners!
We are delighted to announce that Inclusionaries Lab has won the prestigious “Culture for Innovation” award in the North West Coast Research and Innovation Awards 2023, for the Designer-in-Residence collaboration with Marie Curie UK Hospice Liverpool, called “Design meets Palliative care”.
The award is run by three NHS bodies, the Innovation Agency; NIHR Clinical Research Network North West Coast (CRN NWC); and Applied Research Collaboration North West Coast (ARC NWC) and recognises the best innovation and research in health and care across the UK North West Coast region from NHS organisations, industry and academic partners, third sector organisations, local authorities and other collaborators in health innovation.
The Inclusionaries collaboration with Marie Curie Hospice was the first design-led initiative to win this prestigious award, and it is particularly encouraging to see the role and value of design being recognised beyond health product or service development, and as an agent of health research and innovation by our health and care systems.
We know design has a lot to offer to health research and innovation. Conventionally though, the two have functioned within their own operational and disciplinary environments, leading to cilos which slow down innovation and limit exposure, understanding and uptake. Our Designer-in-Residence programme for design-led research and innovation in palliative care, aims to bridge the gap through co-locating design principles, mindsets and practices with health and care expertise at the heart of a busy hospice.
Through the Design-Researcher-in-Residence model we asked:
1. What happens if we put design researchers as residents at the heart of a busy hospice?
2. How could we advance palliative care research through co-locating design
principles and methods with health and care expertise?
To make an interdisciplinary collaboration of such nature happen within an organisation, and to be invited ‘inside and on board’, great partners and strong partnerships are needed. These include internal non-designer allies who believe in a shared vision and have passion for progressing interdisplianry practice. We would like to say thanks to our amazing clinical partners and the whole team at Marie Curie Hospice Liverpool for being fully on board!
We will continue working with our palliative care partners to learn from the process and explore potentials to adopt and scale the impact and outcome of this initiative. The next steps are to run a first “Good Design in Hospice Care” workshop at Marie Curie UK headquarters aimed at the organisation’s senior executives and team leaders, and developing an advanced multi-media engagement package in co-imagining value-driven and technology-enabled futures of palliative care. Looking forward to it!
The Inclusionaries Lab 