4 An introduction to personas
By Danielle Hitch
As interventions for people recovering from COVID-19 evolve, delivering patient-centred care becomes an increasingly important aspect of best care. Understanding the needs and preferences of patients is critical to designing care plans and healthcare services that meet their needs and expectations.
What are personas?
Personas are tools for gaining a deeper understanding of patients and their unique perspectives. They are created to represent different types of people who might use a particular product or service. In healthcare, personas are created to represent patients, caregivers, and other stakeholders who interact with healthcare services. They are detailed descriptions of a person and their experience with a specific health condition (in this case, Long COVID). The following chapters provide a series of personas on the ‘people’ used in many of the learning and reflective activities within this textbook. Please watch the following brief video for examples of how personas can support business owners in designing their marketing strategies.
“Personas” by DIY Toolkit – YouTube is licensed under CC BY 3.0.
Personas are also used as a basis for improving healthcare services. They are not meant to represent any specific individual but are a combination of characteristics, symptoms and issues typically experienced by a category of person. Personas are fictional representations of individuals or groups that are based on research and data.
How were the personas in this textbook created?
All of the personas in this textbook were co-authored by a person with Long COVID (also known as a lived experience expert). These co-authors responded to an expression of interest circulated on social media and were paid for their time and expertise. As part of our commitment to transparency when working with co-authors, a memorandum of understanding was developed listing mutual expectations and arrangements for signature before the commencement of writing. All co-authors chose from a list of proposed personas but were also able to suggest other ‘people’ they would like to develop. The proposed personas were developed by the editorial team to ensure we provide readers with a diverse range of ‘people’ with which to practice their new skills.
The lived experience co-authors then completed an online template providing major headings and prompts to develop the details of their persona. They were also given a choice of three photographs to represent their ‘person’ and were free to add in as much or as little detail as they wished. The project team then wrote up a full draft of the persona, founded on the template information but also incorporating findings from qualitative research and other evidence. The draft of the persona was then returned to the lived experience co-author for review, at which point they were free to make any changes, additions or subtractions they wished. With their approval, the finalised persona is then published in this textbook.
What do personas offer?
Personas have the potential to contribute to multiple aspects of healthcare. They can be used in healthcare education to design learning experiences that meet the unique needs of different types of learners. For example, a persona representing an older patient with dementia living in a residential care home could be used to design educational materials that develop the skills of occupational therapy students working with this patient population. Personas can also be used in healthcare service delivery to design services that meet the unique needs and preferences of patient groups. In this textbook, the personas represent a range of lived experiences for people living with Long COVID. Apart from providing a basis for learning and reflective activities, they could also be used to design healthcare services tailored to the needs of this group of patients.
What are the benefits of using personas?
Personas can;
- Provide a deeper understanding of patients and their unique perspectives.
- Support empathy for patient needs and experiences among health professionals, other caregivers and other stakeholders.
- Enable the design of relevant, effective and accessible healthcare services.
- Improve patient satisfaction and outcomes.
- Provide a framework for decision-making that assists services in making informed choices aligned with patient preferences and goals.
- Promote cultural competency by exposing health professionals and other caregivers to the experiences of patients from different cultural backgrounds.
- Support interprofessional collaboration by developing a shared understanding of patients among different healthcare professionals.
- Help to identify gaps in service delivery by highlighting unmet patient needs or preferences.
What are the limitations of personas?
Personas can;
- Become misleading or present an unrealistic vision of patient needs if they don’t have a basis in experience and data.
- Require periodic updates as patient groups change and new priority patient groups emerge.
- Not be the sole source of decision-making, which needs to also be supported by other data and inquiry.
- Be less engaging and less successful as a tool for design and development when they lack a description of the needs and preferences of patients, and focus only on processes or procedures from the health service perspective.
- Never substitute for building and maintaining a relationship with a real-life patient.
How to use the personas in this textbook.
The personas presented here have two main functions. The first is to provide a foundation for the learning and reflective activities within this textbook. The second is to provide a resource for use by readers in other contexts. Under the provisions of the Creative Commons licence for this textbook (CC-BY-NC-4.0) you can share (copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose) these personas for your own purposes. For example, you could rewrite sections of the personas to make them more relevant to your local community or choose elements of them as inspiration for development activities.
We hope you enjoy reading and applying these personas as much as we have thoroughly enjoyed creating them. If you have any suggestions for future personas or would like to collaborate with the editorial team on creating one, please contact us at covidtextbook@deakin.edu.au.
