When the patient is left out, healthcare fails
Consider a familiar scene in a clinic in Kumasi or Accra. A woman waits three hours. She gets five minutes. The clinician speaks quickly, largely in English, using terms she does not recognize. She nods. She asks nothing. She leaves with a prescription she cannot fully explain when she reaches home. A week later, the medicine is unfinished. The file is marked non-compliant. The family calls it carelessness. The clinician calls it ignorance. Our paper in Discover Health Systems offers a different reading. The difficulty may not lie with the woman. It may lie with a system that has not created room for her to take part. That is the central concern of co-creation.
