Designing Women Friendly Healthcare Services in Egypt
Company: Shamseya for Innovative Healthcare Services | Role: Co-Lead Researcher | Year: 2021|
Project: Focus groups & secondary research | Project Team: Ayah Abo-Basha, Nesma Amin, Mostafa ElHakim, and Aya El-Hosseiny
Question
How do we ensure services offered by our partnering healthcare facilities are accessible, responsive, and comfortable for patients who identify as women?
Methods
Designed and facilitated a series of 3 successive focus groups with 8 internal stakeholders including researchers and project managers to provide insights into the perceived strengths and pain points of partnering facilities’ services as experienced by female patients
Sourced secondary research on reported gender biases in Egypt’s healthcare delivery systems from publications by WHO, UNFPA, and NGO reports as well as academic sources
Analysis
Synthesized key themes from focus groups through rolling and final analysis to generate a few archetypes of patients who identify as women from various backgrounds and their main challenges when seeking health service needs.
Key Insights
The most popular challenges female-identifying patients in Egypt face when seeking health services can be grouped into four categories: 1)Availability 2) Accessibility 3) Acceptability 4) Quality 5) Safety. A comprehensive breakdown of the categories, distilled from the research process, can be found at the assessment link in the next section.
Deliverables
The team designed and presented an assessment toolkit, in the form of an online questionnaire, for the organization to evaluate its pilot project implementation following its women friendly service training. The assessment will be used by Shamseya team members as well as trained mystery patients.
Impact
- Shamseya intended to grant a few pilot facilities a “Women-Friendly” label, based on passing the assessment designed through the UX research, to empower women to access the best quality of medical care available.
- This project reached 10.3k+ followers to generate awareness about the quality of medical care female patients are entitled to.