Improving people's access to community-based back pain treatment through an inclusive design approach

Abstract

Back pain is a very common health problem and affects people across the world. This study applies an Inclusive Design approach to a community-based back pain service to understand the challenges, in relation to patients' capabilities, that can affect their access to the service. It consisted of three steps: i) online surveys and interviews with physiotherapists and collected patients' personal online care stories to gather insight into their experiences within the back pain care journeys; ii) estimated services' demands made on patients when they access the service and identified the related challenges and iii) proposed recommendations that could address the challenges for patients to access the service. The study suggests an Inclusive Design approach could help identify capability-related challenges such as vision and memory which could affect people's access to back pain treatment. In addition, the application of the approach also uncovered some non-capability-related challenges.