11.P. Skills building seminar: Co-design workshop on reducing institutionalisation in mental health facilities by everyday objects

Abstract Psychiatric facilities tend to resemble highly institutional settings in which patients experience a severe loss of control in impersonal and sterile built environments. Design features such as everyday objects offer the potential to be psychosocially beneficial by strengthening patients' internal locus of control and increasing their well-being. Building on material priming and consumer psychology research, this workshop aims at ideating concepts to increase domesticity in psychiatric wards and allow higher levels of control and individualisation in patients. Using co-creation methods, participants will transfer concepts from non-clinical settings to the complex and challenging context of mental health. Three seven-minutes-presentations introduce the topic in a transdisciplinary manner - medical architecture, environmental psychology and design research.Then, during a subsequent role playing co-creation workshop, participants will take either the role of a patient or a member of the hospital management. “Patients” will be asked to leave for a couple of minutes to explore their surroundings and return, bringing with them and presenting to the rest of the participants an object from their domestic surroundings that they find valuable to equip a psychiatric patient room. During their absence, “M embers of hospital management” will assume more detailed roles (for example somebody might wish to be the infection control person, some other the clinical director e...
Source: The European Journal of Public Health - Category: General Medicine Source Type: research