My Back! Development and implementation of a co-designed municipal back rehabilitation

BACKGROUND
‘My Back’ is a co-design research project including citizens, a university, a university college, and a municipality. Initially, we studied municipal rehabilitation-practices, citizens and employees' experiences with municipal rehabilitation, and current best practice. The challenge was to merge this complex knowledge into meaningful actions, conducting the research-question: which actions are relevant and implementable in the actual municipality to optimize back pain rehabilitation?

METHODS
We used a mixed-method research study focusing on user-involvement and co-design. The participants were employees from Municipality's Sickness Benefit Department/Job Centre and the Rehabilitation Department, managers from both departments, and researchers. Citizens with long-term back problems referred to municipal rehabilitation from hospitals participated using co-design workshops and citizens' panels. We used design thinking to develop prototype actions (short-time, iterative, practical processes with idea-generation and evaluation) to test for further implementation potential.
RESULTS
Based on initial studies and co-design workshops, we focused on micro-changes of interpersonal relations and digital platforms, as well as knowledge-sharing between the employees of the departments to optimize rehabilitation-practice to support citizens managing long-term back problems. Three development areas emerged: 1) Knowledge and skills, 2) Management of rehabilitation, and 3) Organizational processes. Employees and managers initiated the following prototyping actions: regular meetings for the employees to create relations and optimize rehabilitation-practices, knowledge-sharing of competences and organization, digital platforms with information on back problems for professionals and citizens, consent-procedures for sharing information, rules for round-table discussions, information on citizens simultaneous connected to both departments, and visiting the other department.
Furthermore, we developed a model describing the actions for the implementation of knowledge-informed rehabilitation-practices, possible connections between resources, activities, and results.
CONCLUSIONS
Citizens, employees, managers, and researchers indicated that the design thinking process was meaningful for creating new, relevant, and sustainable solutions through micro-changes. The actions are currently being upscaled and implemented in the two departments.