Currently accepted at: Journal of Participatory Medicine
Date Submitted: Jun 5, 2026
Date Accepted: Oct 26, 2026
This paper has been accepted and is currently in production.
It will appear shortly on 10.2196/103761
The final accepted version (not copyedited yet) is in this tab.
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Designing a Healthy Aging Website with Older Women Post-Incarceration: Description of a Liberatory Co-Design Process and Lessons Learned
ABSTRACT
Background:
Older women (age 50+) in the United States comprise a growing share of the community-dwelling population with lived experience of incarceration. When older women return from incarceration to communities, they face barriers in finding work, housing, and regular health care. Many return following extended periods of inadequate care for chronic conditions and little or no access to preventive services. On reintegrating, older women may also struggle to navigate an unfamiliar health services landscape. Much community programming and research in reentry focuses on men and younger women with few programs designed specifically to meet older women’s needs.
Objective:
The Kansas City–based, Older Women Leading Healthy Aging Research Together (OWLHART) patient and stakeholder group was formed to build capacity for engagement in patient-centered research. Our objective in this report is to describe OWLHART’s website co-design project.
Methods:
Over nine months, the OWLHART group and a website design partner applied a liberatory co-design method to develop a website.
Results:
We offer a 6-step co-design process, notes on challenges we met in applying the process, and a project-adaptable checklist.
Conclusions:
Community-based co-design takes time, flexibility, and creativity to maintain commitment across a group, but a structured, iterative approach with an emphasis on equality in participation can help groups achieve and sustain involvement in creating health care tools they desire and can use.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.