Abstract
BackgroundThe utilisation of good design practices in the development of complex health services is essential to improving quality. Healthcare organisations, however, are often seriously out of step with modern design thinking and practice. As a starting point to encourage the uptake of good design practices, it is important to understand the context of their intended use. This study aims to do that by articulating current health service development practices.MethodsEleven service development projects carried out in a large mental health service were investigated through in-depth interviews with six operation managers. The critical decision method in conjunction with diagrammatic elicitation was used to capture descriptions of these projects. Stage-gate design models were then formed to visually articulate, classify and characterise different service development practices.ResultsProjects were grouped into three categories according to design process patterns: new service introduction and service integration; service improvement; service closure. Three common design stages: problem exploration, idea generation and solution evaluation - were then compared across the design process patterns. Consistent across projects were a top-down, policy-driven approach to exploration, underexploited idea generation and implementation-based evaluation.ConclusionsThis study provides insight into where and how good design practices can contribute to the improvement of current service development practices. Specifically, the following suggestions for future service development practices are made: genuine user needs analysis for exploration; divergent thinking and innovative culture for idea generation; and fail-safe evaluation prior to implementation. Better training for managers through partnership working with design experts and researchers could be beneficial.
Highlights
Introduction of memoryGovernment policies services to primary care GPs’ complaints2
The utilisation of good design practices to develop complex health services is essential to their quality [1,2,3,4]
Good design practices can be defined as methods that lead to design artifacts, either products or services, having a ‘fitness for purpose’ for their task while maintaining commercial viability [5]
Summary
Introduction of memoryGovernment policies services to primary care GPs’ complaints2. The utilisation of good design practices in the development of complex health services is essential to improving quality. Healthcare organisations, are often seriously out of step with modern design thinking and practice. The utilisation of good design practices to develop complex health services is essential to their quality [1,2,3,4]. Healthcare organisations, are often considered seriously out of step with modern design thinking and practice, in relation to patient safety [8,9]. This is not due to a lack of health care-specific tools. Many remain at a conceptual level and have not been utilised to the same degree as in other sectors such as automotive and aerospace [8,14]
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