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Future healthcare education at University College Copenhagen

This case explores how University College Copenhagen in collaboration with Danish Design Center used future scenarios to align and re-design programmes across the Faculty of Health Sciences. Today, University College Copenhagen uses future scenarios as a tool when designing educational programmes, in building competences among their staff, and in classes with future healthcare professionals.

The collaboration was an expansion of a partnership around the joint scenario project Boxing Future Health. A set of scenarios for the future of healthcare developed by Danish Design Center in collaboration with University College Copenhagen and a series of other public and private organisations from the health care sector.

The case provides examples of how evocative alternative futures can be used on multiple levels: Making long-term strategic decisions by faculty management, in co-creating new educational programmes, and as a sort of boundary object facilitating new dialogues and reflections among students.

Although the case is based on an educational setting, the general approaches should be replicable in other settings just as well.

Description

Digital, technological, and medical development is constantly pushing the boundaries of not only healthcare but also the understanding of diseases, health, and the human body itself. These new understandings create new requirements, and these will apply to the health service as a whole, but equally to the associated institutions, professional groups, and individual health professionals.

In the fall of 2018, the Faculty of Health Sciences (SFF) at University College Copenhagen and the Danish Design Center entered a collaboration to ensure that the transformations we see on the healthcare horizon today are discussed, decided upon, and included in the Faculty of Health Science, education building, competence development, and teaching.

Design

The collaboration was based on the project Boxing Future Health. Here, four possible future scenarios are set up within the health area. Transformation possibilities are put at the forefront and this activates and provokes new ways of thinking. Through an experimental and systematic process combining design methods and future research, the Faculty of Health Sciences’ practice and insights were brought into play through a targeted process named Future Challenge.

24 participants – heads of department, heads of education, and the Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences participated in the course, which was built around five phases and a series of workshops:

  • Phase 0 — Scoping: Setting the stage, identifying the relevant themes and planning the process.
  • Phase 1 — Exploring the future: Opening up and building a shared understanding of the critical dilemmas the future might bring by exploring and discussing the four future scenarios for 2050. Through this work new challenges and opportunities were discovered.
  • Phase 2 — Co-creating the future: Finding the way back from 2050 to the present using the identified challenges and opportunities to identify new possible actions and setting a new strategic direction.
  • Phase 3 — Making the future: Qualifying the new strategic direction and discussing how to get there and what needs to be true.
  • Phase 4 — The future is now: Anchoring the insights and planning how to implement the necessary changes.

Impacts

The project resulted in a closer collaboration across the management team, new educational profiles being created, and inter-professional collaborations among students. As a result, today educational leaders from different fields work together to develop new courses across disciplines.

Further information

The scenarios developed as part of Boxing Future Health. For more information on the process feel free to reach out to Danish Design Center.