significant project
innovation, co-design, teams
who
project description
paper
abstract
material
Better Services by Design (BSBD) - better ways of designing health and social care services
UCHD (User-centred Healthcare Design)
Sheffield Hallam University
NIHR CLAHRC South Yorkshire
Better Services by Design (BSBD) was a research project run by User-centred Healthcare Design (UCHD) aimed to develop better ways of designing health and social care services. Invited partners like Sheffield IAPT (Improving Access to Psychological Therapies) and Doncaster Metropolitan Borrow Council were working with UCHD to learn how to use creative thinking and methods in their own health and social care service development projects. In overall ‘Better Services By Design’ project aimed improve wellbeing in Doncaster Borrow (South Yorkshire).
UCHD team used three principles:
Designing for people not patients. Understanding people’s lived experiences, not just as service-users but human beings with feelings and wider goals;
Designing with people. Produce sustainable change by working with service users and providers to include their specialist knowledge and give them a strong voice in how services should change;
Designing for innovation. Use making and other creative activities to explore broader possibilities, focus on solutions and deal with complex problems.
This paper analyzes a subset of data from a project that sought to transfer knowledge and skills around design led approaches for service improvement to teams working in Health and Social Care in the United Kingdom. Through this analysis the authors sought to understand the range of responses that individual participants had to undertaking service improvement work in a design led project. This was a qualitative study using interviews to gain reflections from participants. These interview transcripts were analyzed using framework analysis. Participants were recruited from three disparate organizations, a public health team of a local authority, a mental health charity and a UK National Health Service mental health initiative. Six main themes were identified, namely; design practice, collaborative working, creating an environment for innovation, team skills and attitudes and transfer of knowledge. The findings suggest that the design approach can contribute to a range of factors that have been identified as valuable for innovative teams. The paper adds to the evidence base and supports further exploration of the use of design in Service improvement and wider innovation endeavours.