Empathy Mapping for people with dementia

Pros and Cons

Useful for: 

• getting staff to focus on the feelings, experiences, challenges and needs of service users.
• improving service user experience by bringing relevant data to the attention of commissioners and/or healthcare staff so that they can personalise care, improve services or design new ones. 
• although people living with dementia may not be in the workshop itself, the voices and observed experiences of people with dementia are influencing the people with the authority and responsibility to make change.

Disadvantages:

• The process often does not involve people with dementia, or carers, in the workshop activity. Yet the only people who REALLY know what it's like to live with dementia today, are people living with dementia today. 

Costs: this may require bringing several people together face-to-face to work together. Costs relating to gathering data reports will depend on the situation.

Time:  workshop activity plus data gathering.

Preparation

Gather

• data you have about the experience of people living with dementia
• personas you have made with/for people living with dementia
• your team (and if possible people affected by dementia).

Creating the empathy map - workshop activity

Create your map using large sheets of paper or a whiteboard, post-it notes (in a variety of colours if possible), and marker pens.

• You can freehand sketch your map together, which can be good for encouraging an inclusive and collaborative culture, or print worksheets from the many free templates available online. 
• Download an empathy map canvas to work with.

The Results

The map itself is a simple, visual, document.

After the workshop

Learning about the service user experience, including whether it has improved after creating and implementing a solution, comes from

• the process of creating the maps.
• further data from service users - for example responses to a targeted question in service user satisfaction surveys compared before and after the solution has been implemented.
• training staff in the use of empathy maps to encourage them to value the feelings, and 'pain points' or challenges, of the service user.

Update the empathy map in further workshop activity when new data is available. 
 

Useful Links

Innovation Tools - presentation on how to do empathy mapping

Example of Rotterdam Eye Hospital improving patient experience through the use of empathy mapping: 'How Design Thinking is Improving Patient-Caregiver conversations', Harvard Business Review, 2017.