Objectives: Co-design or participatory design is an approach to design attempting to actively involve all stakeholders in the design process to help ensure the result meets their needs and is usable. Participatory design is an approach which is focused on processes and procedures of design and is not a design style. With the idea of redesigning healthcare processes from patients’ perspectives, co-design in health research provides end-users an even platform with researchers in leading service design. The application of co-design in healthcare aims to address the misalignment between researchers’ aims and end-users’ needs, which is the main reason of research waste. The purpose of this paper was to inform available co-design approaches in health care and discuss contextual factors affecting the application of codesign in consideration of the Vietnamese health context.
Methods: The application of co-design approaches in health technology intervention was developed from the synthesis of existing literature and the comments from all stakeholders regarding the Vietnamese health context.
Discussion: Co-design has been developed long time ago, however its application in health care has started recently. The involvement of ‘patient’, ‘stakeholder’, or ‘public’ in designing and redesigning healthcare services is the signature of co-design approaches. While it is hard to define the most effective co-design approach to use, healthcare providers, health researchers and health policymakers should prioritise services-users’ perspectives and needs as well as consider contextual factors in health care in Vietnam.