By Diana Gapak-Hughes and Dalya Marks
The Perspectivity Challenge game is a platform allowing individual and shared narratives to unfold as players navigate challenges and build on each other’s decisions and experiences. Participants get a sense of the complexity and dilemmas surrounding a number of key issues and the consequences of decisions.
The Perspectivity Public Health Challenge (“PPHC”) allows players to adopt a public health lens when making decisions and considering the trade-offs inherent in public health. It can be played by those with little or no experience of public health, even in high school settings all the way through to senior executives. The wide spectrum of players shows the potential for the learning to spread into everyday thinking.
Having travelled the world, the PPHC is particularly grounded in the UK public health educational setting. It was launched in the UK in 2015 and co-developed by Dalya Marks (co-author of this article), who has a wealth of experience in researching, teaching and delivering programmes aimed at reducing health inequalities. Over 800 people have played the PPHC between 2015-19, and since its reintroduction post-COVID in May 2024, close to 200 more have played.
In each of the eight rounds, players teamed up across six regions are faced with many choices, and they are continually weighing up the costs and benefits of how they allocate their resources in the event of a disease outbreak, whilst simultaneously maximising the quality of their population’s health. They can spend on preventative or curative services and/or research and surveillance. Players can adopt a regional approach or co-operate with other regions and adopt a global lens.
The PPHC unlocks a dialogue around the wider determinants of health, such as housing, education and our environment. These wider social determinants are critical for addressing the wicked problems, negative impact and associated poverty and poor health linked to health inequalities. Organisations can benefit from their employees and partners understanding and enacting the value of working towards a common goal, as the PPHC promotes co-creation and encourages consideration of multiple factors in time-pressured situations.
In September 2024, a pilot rapid six-round game session with debrief was delivered at Islington Council in London, UK. None of the players worked in public health but instead came from diverse local government departments. The session’s feedback shows that there is a great opportunity to expand the reach of the PPHC into non-public health and non-educational settings, to convey learning in a shortened time frame. During the debrief session facilitated by Marks, participants reflected on how the PPHC aligns with their organisational values that they brought to the table.
“I enjoyed the challenge. It was important to consider the way we played holistically, as the actions of others also affected our own game. I found it frustrating at times when I felt that I had a solution, but had to negotiate this with others to come to a workable solution. In the end, it was a fun way to see the challenges that public health faces”.
The pilot session showed that diverse stakeholders agreed on the importance of working collaboratively to achieve jointly-owned priorities to improve the population’s health within tight financial constraints. Reducing inequalities and shifting the balance to communities and preventative services is high on the agenda. Using the PPHC as a conduit for such messaging and as the starting point of a conversation with partners will support this goal.
Having successfully delivered the quick-fire pilot, there is a scope to extend and leverage its impact to broader audiences beyond public health. Organisations could incorporate the PPHC into their learning and development plans as a tool to deliver an experiential, collaborative experience alongside discussions of jointly facing challenging goals of reducing the ill-effects of widening health inequalities. The latter becomes feasible as the PPHC allows one to achieve a sense of agency, essential in transforming the individual into an emergent collective.
More information?
- More information about the Perspectivity Challenge can be found here.
- Curious to experience a game session yourself? Get in touch for more information.