Things to consider
As the old saying goes, ask a silly question and you will get a silly answer! Successful social design, social innovation and social enterprise are as much about identifying appropriate questions and issues to be addressed by intervention as it is about creating the responses to those questions. Before you can design (or co-design) a solution you need to fully understand the problems that are faced.
You are asked to work with local stakeholders to identify what issues need to be addressed to improve their quality of life and well being. The aim is to identify which of the national themes discussed on this site are of greatest relevance to your local community and the people you chose to work with in it. In short, you need to co-design your local brief before you design your response.
The Audi Design Foundation ran a workshop with designers, researchers and advocates for design for health to identify some national and international hot topics and key questions that design might address. How do the questions below relate to your local scenario? Do you and your stakeholders have the skills to address these questions? Are they important to you? If not what questions are more relevant to your local community and their situation and how will you use them to create your own design brief?
Hot Topic I: Prevention - National Wellness Service
Brief/question:
- How could the NHS become more proactive in preventing illness?
Situational context
- Could resources be used more effectively if a targeted illness prevention policy was implemented?
- How could a greater focus on prevention in the wider social arena be instigated? Could this reduce costs to the health service in the long run?
- What illnesses are currently screened for?
- What illnesses are easily preventable but have significant impacts on health resources?
- What NHS campaigns currently exist to reduce illness and promote health?
Other comments
- Consider tools to prevent hospital admissions and decentralise health care and advice
- As well as physical health, mental health should also be considered as this has significant impacts on the health service and society as a whole
Hot Topic II: Environment
Brief/question:
- How could shared resources impact positively on health services?
Situational context
- Who decides where you go for treatment?
- Where does care actually take place?
- What treatment environments exist and do these have a high level of patient satisfaction?
- How does the therapeutic environment affect health outcomes?
- What opportunities to share resources exist between different healthcare centres? What opportunities to share resources exist between the healthcare centres and their local community?
Other comments
- Consider counselling, treatment for addictions and palliative care as well as more mainstream treatment environments
- Risks and benefits to sharing resources
- Would some services traditionally found in general hospitals be better sited within the heart of their communities?
Hot Topic III: Enabling Patients and Communities
Brief / question
- Should we consider new ways of ‘doing’ health care and creating social enterprise?
Situational context
- What is the best way to identify patient requirements?
- Should patients be treated as customers?
- Consider difficult to reach groups, for example: young people, more demanding people, people with English as a second language
- How to enable patients to get the right care
Other comments
- How could the community be involved in providing care and rewarded for reducing the burden on the NHS
- Cost implications of new setup
- Health tourism and competition between providers
- Group care as a social model, for example elderly people buying homes together to pool resources and pay for their own personal care
- New models of care homes for the elderly or people with long-term health issues
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