Winter - Spring 2025
Designing for Healthcare Equity: Community-Led Research for UW Medicine
Instructors:
- Gary Hsieh (HCDE Faculty)
- Aric Ho (UW Medicine)
- Paula Houston (UW Medicine)
- Ruoxi Shang (HCDE PhD student)
UW Medicine is committed to becoming a leader in healthcare equity. We are embarking on a journey to develop our Healthcare Equity Blueprint 3.0, a strategic plan that will guide our efforts to eliminate health inequities and create a more just and inclusive healthcare system for all. To ensure this plan truly reflects the needs and experiences of our diverse community, we need your help! We are seeking talented and passionate Human-Centered Design students to join us in gathering crucial insights from a variety of impacted parties.
One of the guiding principles for inclusion is, “nothing about us without us”, and we believe that utilizing HCD techniques is a powerful way to ensure our key parties have a voice at the table.
Healthcare equity is a pressing issue of our time. In this DRG, you will have the opportunity to contribute to meaningful solutions that address systemic inequities and improve the health and well-being of our community. Your participation will help shape a more just and equitable future for all.
This project spans across Winter and Spring quarters to allow us time to do deep, meaningful research without feeling rushed. Here's how it breaks down:
- Winter quarter: We will focus on getting to know our stakeholders, developing study protocol, and conducting focus groups and interviews. This gives us time to really listen to diverse voices across UW Medicine and build relationships with our participants.
- Spring quarter: We will shift to making sense of all the rich insights we've gathered. We'll dive into analysis, identify key themes, and craft recommendations that could shape the future of healthcare equity at UW Medicine.
While we'd love to have you join us for the full journey, we understand if you can only commit to one quarter! The work naturally shifts between quarters - from data gathering to analysis - so you can still make meaningful contributions in either phase.
Your Responsibilities:
- Collaborate with students and faculty to develop focus group protocols and materials.
- Facilitate engaging and inclusive discussions with Focus Group members recruited by UW Medicine (including medical students, residents, faculty, staff, patients and families, EDI champions, and community members representing different lived experiences).
- Analyze qualitative data to identify key themes and insights.
- Synthesize findings into reports and presentations.
- Contribute to the development of recommendations for Blueprint 3.0.
Enrollment information
- Meeting time: Meeting time will be determined based on student availability
- Credits: 2 credits recommended (equivalent to 2 hours of in-person DRG class meetings and 4 hours of additional work per week)
- Who should apply: MS & PhD students with qualitative research experience
- This DRG counts toward the directed research requirement for PhD students.
- To apply: Complete this Google Form by midnight on December 5, 2024.
- Anticipated notification date: December 15, 2024
- Questions? Ruoxi Shang (Anna), HCDE, rxshang@uw.edu
Aric Ho, Office of Healthcare Equity; ajho@uw.edu