18

Participatory approaches are increasingly popular in the development and enhancement of healthcare and services. While there is consensus about involving the affected individuals without exploiting their participation, this encourages reflection on what constitutes best practice. This article presents the conditions necessary for conducting action research that involves parents’ experiential knowledge in developing a monitoring system for a new maternity ward. To achieve this, an experience-based codesign method was tested. The findings reveal that the facilitation team’s reflective application of the principles guiding the approach helped meet the codesign objectives and impacted both the participants and the departmental organisation.