Health service design… from the UK to Spain!

Designing health services is to me the most attractive part of service design. It is really close to people and relies deeply on them. And health is such a complex question: it depends not only on a medical treatment but also on the alimentation, the physical activity, the psychological (or emotional) state, the family, the community, the relationship and communication with medical staff, the ability of self-managing… and health care is not just the moment in which you cure a disease, it embraces the whole life…

In this article by Ben Reason, you can find a related analysis (analysis of an article by Lord Darzi in NHS’ InView journal.)

“As the Darzi Review makes clear, health services that care for people only when they become sick are not enough. We need to support people to lead healthy lives, stay out of hospital and feel good. This requires a shift from the traditional industrial thinking focused on quantity and productivity and a narrow definition of efficiency (how many cancer patients can we treat with these resources?) to a new way of thinking. “

(I really recommend reading the whole article about personalizing health services and key elements of Service Thinking +++)

Solutions to better health can (or should) consider all these aspects and empower them trough the use of intelligent/adapted networks and technologies.
And it makes sense that designing health services, as it is definitely linked to people behaviour’s, should be based on co-design practices.

Some inspiring (UK) examples
I must admit that I am a fan of thinkpublic, UK service design consultancy, specialized in the public sector. They have been working on different projects of this kind and they are really inspiriting.
Those two projects are very interesting and well documented:
•    The Alzheimer 100 Project: a project that aims to come up with creative solutions to the challenges presented by dementia. (thinkpublic’s post)
In this project thinkpublic used intensive co-design methods and developed a full set of activities and supports to do so. In this article from the Australian Medical Journal you can find a detailed explanation of the process. It is really interesting to imagine people with dementia participating actively in the investigation, filming, bringing inputs in the research. It must have been quite a challenge but the insights collected must have been of real value and meaning to them.
•    YouCanKingston: “An ambitious project is under way to tackle health inequalities on the Cambridge Road estate in Kingston, Surrey, through research-based design.” An investigation project to identify what kind of services and activities might be delivered to the Cambridge Road Estate to have a “healthy and happy” life. Here is the project blog.

Another famous example of heath service design is live|work’s solution for MS patient  (read about it in this article from the New York Times)

“Our service re-design ensures that each patient is given access to a specific MS service that is tailored to their individual needs during the different stages of their life. Patients are also given direct access to relevant information and a clinical team who they can communicate with online, over the phone or face-to-face.” (Ben Reason) (more details in the previous article from live|work)

Improvement for patients, carers and families
What is really meaningful in this kind of approach in developing health services is that you create ownership and sense for both patients and carers. The NHS Institute has developed the Experienced based design (EBD), “an exciting new way of bringing patients and staff together to share the role of improving care and re-designing services.”
And here is a very interesting comment regarding the result of such practices:

“(…) delivering the sort of care pathways that leave patients feeling safer, happier and more valued, and making staff feel more positive, rewarded and empowered.”

Hanging around on the net, I found an interesting student thesis project dealing with communication and families in children care.

“The aim of this project is to study both the emotional journey of parents with children at Pittsburgh Children's Hospital as well as the current methods for information delivery, and develop an enhanced system or service that will hopefully improve the current methods of family education.”

Here is her project’s video presenting a solution for communication and better medical experience for a child and his mother.



… to Spain
I recently discovered a Spanish Service Design Agency (in Bilbao and recently in Madrid) called Funky Project.
I am quite glad to see that they are spreading the ideas of service design and how it can be applied to health services. They are organizing events, workshops and developing communication to explain the challenges that service design can tackle.
•    a post about service design with a tv report about service design.

•    a workshop in which they invited Julia Scheaper, service designer and Associate of the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement (UK), to talk about ‘Service design and health’, with the objective of looking into the innovation possibilities focused on people within the health environment. "Amongst the attendees of this edition will be those in charge of public health in the Basque Country, chemists, specialists in human factors and service design, persons in charge of citizen participation, application developers and directives of mutual insurance company, with the overall intention of creating enriching synergies for the healthcare sector."

And this might be just the beginning. I am dreaming of a Spanish thinkpublic or live|work to improve Spanish public health services, sure that there are great opportunities and that Spain is facing the same challenges as the rest of Europe (Elderly people, Alzheimer, saturated services, waiting lines…).
TBC