Strategic change
Designing strategic change
Involving a much wider group of stakeholders in designing health services offers the chance to make big changes to the way healthcare is organised and delivered.
But to make sure innovation in healthcare becomes a lasting reality, organisations and institutions responsible for designing and delivering healthcare within the UK will need to engage and commit to the process.
Fundamental changes are difficult to enact in large, complex, bureaucratic and democratically accountable public organisations such as the UK NHS. Part of the challenge is to find ways for concerned professionals, designers and patient advocates to interact with the broader NHS system in designing futures.
Within the UCHD project we are responding to this challenge by working in partnership with the NHS in an action research framework. The project team consists of a mixture of people working in both the NHS and Sheffield Hallam University. We also interact in partnership with third sector groups as important participants in the wider health ecology.
We therefore have a mix of senior academic, management and researcher positions. On the NHS side we have access to staff in charge of training and development and we deliver courses to staff. We also receive secondments of health professionals to work on UCHD projects to learn about our approach.
The partnership between academic and healthcare professionals at all levels of the planning, management, execution and dissemination of UCHD research provides evidence that this design approach can work in the NHS, and builds the common ground and shared learning that will lay the foundation for strategic change.
