CoDe Rainbow
2 Years | Interdisciplinary Team | Research | Co-design
Part of an ongoing research and design effort that started in 2021, CoDe Rainbow is a co-designed simulation-based training on delivering affirmative health care to LGBTQIA+ youth.
Visit the CoDe Rainbow website to learn more or to take the free training yourself! If you're a mental or physical health care provider, you can earn a CE/CME!
CoDe Rainbow training options include three scenarios starring a fictional queer-identified adolescent, Jasper (below). Training components were created in collaboration with LGBTQIA+ youth, community partners, and healthcare providers living in Central Ohio.
The team behind CoDe Rainbow (Zoom call screengrab below) includes folks from a variety of disciplines (social work, pediatric medicine, participatory design, emerging media), backgrounds (academic, professional practice), identities and histories.
Meaningful engagement with folks who would ultimately be impacted by our training was essential to inform its content and form. Recruitment posters and ads (below) were shared in 2021 and 2022.
Participants included queer-identified youth who reside in Ohio and healthcare providers (HCPs) who work in Ohio. An online journaling exercise uncovered daily experiences of youth (below, left), and led to in-person co-design sessions where youth built ideal future health care experiences (below, center). In-person co-design sessions with HCPs (below, right) uncovered issues, assets and opportunities in providing care to and education about identity-affirming care to LGBTQIA+ youth.
Sessions were analyzed and discussed to inform the development of CoDe Rainbow's featured characters, visuals and simulation script (above and below).
Below, an example output from one of the HCP-focused co-design sessions includes sticky notes and arrows outlining the group's ideas about building skills and knowledge about affirmative care on the path to readiness to practice.
To compliment CoDe Rainbow's simulated experiences with Jasper, our team developed a host of other content, from research strategy to educational diagrams to instructional material.
Once cleared for public availability, CoDe Rainbow went live in 2023! The ad, below, was used to promote CoDe Rainbow online. Our team is currently gathering pre-post training survey data to assess training impact. We are also working on several academic publications to share our methods and research outcomes.
CoDe Rainbow has a more official name, "The Medicaid Care Experience Simulation (MCarES) Project," and it's funded by the Ohio Department of Medicaid and administered by the Ohio Colleges of Medicine Government Resource Center. CoDe Rainbow was also developed with LittleSeed, a Columbus Ohio area creative firm specializing in mixed reality.
