Experience-Based Co-Design in Health Services Research: A Participatory Model for Knowledge Generation, Translation, & Implementation in Health Systems

Participatory engagement is a well-documented and commonly pursued goal in healthcare. Yet, models to involve patients, staff, and other stakeholders in research are few, with many uncertainties about how their expertise should be framed, captured, measured, and applied towards change. In this paper, we reflect on the utility of Expe-rience-Based Co-Design (EBCD) in activating—and acting upon—diverse experiential knowledges and serving as a model for involvement in health systems and services research. Derived from design studies and used predominantly in the improvement sciences, EBCD draws upon people's experiences for simultaneous knowledge production and utilisation to trigger and sustain changes in small, localised settings or across large, complex systems. Like other participatory models, it establishes research partnerships between stakeholders, but also leverages those partnerships to collectively develop, implement, and evaluate interventions. Essentially, EBCD enables stakeholders to ex-change mutual experiences of providing, receiving, and organising care, resulting in the shared identification of problems, decisions about preferred solutions, and collective ownership of research end-outputs. As a promising and successful—if underem-ployed—model for research engagement, EBCD has applications in many forms of health systems and services research.