Health and Disability

patients are not customers, and if we treat them as such, we risk converting healthcare into a neoliberal market system. Customers have vastly different expectations and roles in a systems that recognizes the customer-supplier relationship. Rather than elevating “patient experience” this role transformation risks the destruction of human caring in the organization and the larger social system.

 In Design for Care five contexts of participation are identified:

• The patient as health seeker, a self-directed agent responsible for his or her own health and well-being
• The patient as a participant in the healthcare system and subject to the rules and roles this entails
• The patient as a customer of a service, who seeks and pays for treatment directly
• The health seeker or patient as a subject of user research for innovation
• The patient as a person under care, located in a community in a particular society and culture.