ThinkARTank: Creative Approaches to Inclusive Policymaking in Healthcare Settings

Policymaking is creating, developing, and implementing strategies that guide decision-making and actions to regulate certain areas of interest and achieve specific goals. In contexts dealing with wellbeing and health care, policymaking not only governs the delivery, financing, organisation, and regulation of services and systems, but also aims to improve wellbeing and health outcomes to ensure equitable access to care. Policymaking seeks to ensure stakeholders’ needs are considered, but methodologies often lack approaches to drive inclusiveness and engagement among stakeholders. This experimental research explored how creative approaches, such as arts-based methods (ABMs), futures research, and service design methods, including journey maps, can be used as multi-method strategies to lead to amplified inclusivity and engagement for identifying the needs of stakeholders during online stakeholder meetings. The research aimed to explore how to use creative approaches to devise policy strategies based on a better understanding of the needs of stakeholders, such as communities, individuals, NGOs, and institutions. The research prototyped and tested how digitalised ABMs used in stakeholder workshops can contribute to more engaging experiences in policymaking. ABMs and futures research approaches were devised online to encourage and capture participants’ visual and narrative expressions about their visions for the future. The chapter reflects on the results of the experiments and their value for policymaking strategies within healthcare settings, as such processes can potentially be more empathic.