Which human needs remain the same in a future of healthcare where context and circumstances are changing?

The Challenge

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Rigshospitalet was facing the need to make decisions with consequences for both organisational operations and the physical transformation of the hospital, looking ahead to 2040. The hospital leadership were clear from the start that an exploration and mapping of the core needs across patients and their relatives would serve as a key benchmark for the vision work, ensuring that these needs were considered from the outset to the implementation of the vision years from now.

What is a hospital in 2040? Not the same as a hospital in 2023, that is for sure. But the vision for the future of Rigshospitalet could not rely solely on what will change in the future of healthcare, as e.g. technological and scientific advancements will create new opportunities. While preparing for what’s next, Rigshospitalet also had to define a language around what is valuable, now as well as in the future of the hospital. Assessing what is valuable called for an in-depth exploration of how patients and relatives experience living with illness as part of their daily lives, and shedding light on the encounter between them, as whole human beings, and the highly specialized treatment offered by Rigshospitalet, on site, in-home or via digital means. The ambitions were high, with key focus points to ensure project success: We initiated the collaboration by activating existing knowledge on the needs of patients and relatives to clarify areas of solid knowledge, assumptions and curiosities into what we did not yet know. With this map as a navigation point, we defined a strategic approach to dive deep into the lives of selected patients and relatives, to understand their experiences, needs, and reflections and ensure a focus on the human needs that will also be relevant in 2040.

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The approach

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Overall, IS IT A BIRD, together with IMPLEMENT, applied an approach combining futures thinking, deep ethnographic research, and industry trend analysis. We set out to explore and understand the complexities around the encounter between a person experiencing illness and in need of highly specialised treatment, supplementing it with industry trend analysis.

IS IT A BIRD was asked to conduct an anthropological study on the future needs of patients and relatives but chose to start out by taking one step further back and mapping out the extensive knowledge among clinicians and other hospital staff with patient contact, aswell as internal analytical units at Rigshospitalet. This initial mapping allowed us to identify what we already knew and what we had yet to understand, making it possible to sharpen our focus in the subsequent anthropological deep dive. We involved patients and their relatives with needs that we assessed would become even more pressing in the future, situations that would make them even more vulnerable, for example, due to increased home treatment and digital interaction.

Through ethnographic research, 26 people shared their experiences of being patients and relatives at Rigshospitalet. In-home interviews with patients and relatives were supplemented with shorter conversations and observations during visits to the different departments at Rigshospitalet. The participating patients, relatives, and observation locations were selected to represent the variation in both present and future patients and relatives. They were recruited broadly across Rigshospitalet's centres and diseases. Some patients were associated with a single centre, but many attended multiple ones. Furthermore, there was a distribution across treatments at Rigshospitalet's two locations (Blegdamsvej and Glostrup), including acute, planned, outpatient, and inpatient care, as well as across medical and surgical treatments. Finally, in the study, we emphasised target groups that, based on the initial collection of existing knowledge, were identified as underrepresented and/or particularly relevant to understand int he future.

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"Throughout conversations, it's a bond you create or a trust you need to build in relation to the doctors knowing what they are doing, and that's also why you have questions and such. When you haven't spoken at all with the one who is going to operate on you, you haven't had the chance to build that trust, but you just have to believe that they knew what they were doing and had everything under control."

Niels,22 years old patient, about the conversation with the surgeons who is going to operate him.

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The Result

The project not only created a foundational qualitative knowledge of how Rigshospitalet could meet the future needs of patients and relatives but also ensured that the vision for Rigshospitalet 2024 was firmly anchored in what is valuable to patients and relatives, now as well as in the future.

“When thinking of futures, it can be so easy to lose track of the people you are creating value for – this project allowed us to anchor our vision for Rigshospitalet firmly in the experience of the patient.”​

Katrina Pitt Winther, Senior Patient Engagement Officer, Rigshospitalet

Our insights were compiled into an insight report, which included the needs of patients and relatives in the context of highly specialised treatment and a projection of future patient and relative needs.The deliverables provided a shared language for the Future of Rigshospitaletand served as the fuel for the vision workshops with leadership at Rigshospitalet, regional politicians, patient representatives, and staff. The future needs of patients and relatives activated a meaningful dialogue around possible future scenarios and provided a solid point of departure for the process of co-creating a shared vision for Rigshospitalet towards 2040.

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