Embedded Files
De Krook is a collaboration between the library of Ghent, the University of Ghent, and research institute imec. Together, these partners aim to create an environment where people living and working in Ghent can experience a dynamic view on the future.
The Challenge Journey
The Challenge Journey
Who are the community/citizens working on the Europe Challenge?
Since we focus on the challenge “how can we make healthcare more understandable for all citizens of Ghent”, the people we’re working with are doctors and patients. But since anybody can be a “patient” at some point in their life, we see this community as a very broad group. We invite everyone living in Ghent to participate & brainstorm, discuss and experiment with us.
How did you identify and engage your community?
Our community is diverse, so we try to use diverse outreach tools to engage them. Since the Covid-period was a very digital period, we used a lot of digital outreach tools – digital communication, social media, accessible digital content about the theme and the challenge. Increasingly, we would also like to go out into the neighbourhoods of Ghent to connect with people.
What is your overall challenge topic? Which concrete challenges have your communities decided to address and why?
The challenge topic is “how can we make healthcare more understandable for all citizens of Ghent”. Understandable healthcare is a complex challenge. A solution that helps make care more understandable may look very different for everyone. Maybe we make care more understandable through good translations? Maybe we make the most difference by converting complex medical terms and explanations into human language? Maybe a lot of people are looking for someone or something to tell them what their diagnosis means for their daily lives? Or are people mainly looking for support around all those complex digital health tools? We’re tuning into these diverse aspects of the challenge.
How are your communities driving the challenge and what tools are they using?
We started with the overarching theme "The Future of Health." That's a very broad theme. Our first step was to look for focus, to look for one particular challenge within this broad theme. We did that in collaboration with the citizens of Ghent: through brainstorming sessions, conversations and submission forms, we collected a lot of challenges and finally chose one. That challenge revolves around the understandability of care.
To get started with this challenge, we didn't want to start experimenting right away, without background knowledge. This is not a challenge that suddenly appears out of nowhere, but one that has been around for a long time, and on which a lot of people have been working. We especially want to avoid duplicating work, and instead focus on the added value we can offer: in what area has there not yet been experimentation around this challenge, what would be a new step forward? To achieve this, we started with a brainstorming event, at which we brought together all sorts of experts in the field: doctors, scientists, patients (representatives), etc. This was a way for us to bring already existing knowledge to the surface, and link it with each other.
How are your communities reimagining public space?
We try to focus on rethinking the way people interact with health, and how that can be done (even) better in the future. This challenge is not necessarily about physical public space, but about the space that a citizen occupies in the medical system of the city.
In the words of prof. De Maeseneer, one of the participants of our brainstorm about understandable health:
"We talk about understandability, but there are two more words that go with that, and those are ‘trust’ and ‘connection’. Those two things are important because if people feel connected to healthcare and trust it, they can also talk to the healthcare provider. Instead of asking ‘What is wrong with Mr Janssens?’, we should ask ‘What makes life worth living for Mr Janssens?’, ‘What are his life goals that give him meaning and purpose?’. Let's focus on that: how, with everything we have, with our knowledge, with our skills as healthcare experts, can we work with those life goals understandably?"
Image by Studio Edelweiss
How do you see the solutions to your local challenge being replicable / adaptable for other people and in other European contexts?
This problem is peculiar to Ghent, since it is a very diverse city, with many languages and cultures. But Ghent is not the only diverse city in the world. We see this trajectory as a way to come up with solutions that can work locally, and then also be extrapolated to other cities, other countries. We mainly focus on this problem as a "typical urban" problem, not exclusively a "typical Ghent" problem.
Articles and publicity
Articles and publicity
Stay tuned for more content to come!
Page updated
Report abuse