The NHS is wising up to the value offered by the design industry: everything from improving the accuracy of surgical instruments, developing usable software that reduces clinical errors, and designing furniture that reduces MRSA, through to improving the patient experience by helping to design the ways in which non-clinical care is provided.
A new breed of designers have realised they can do more than the glossy consumer-brand work that might have otherwise filled their portfolios. They are bolstering their optimism, creativity and visualisation skills with a whole host of human-centred techniques unique to public sector design.
These advocate observation over assumption; facilitate collaboration between staff and patients; and prototype ideas so they can be seen, felt and tested in realistic contexts.
Helping the NHS through visualisation
One simple way that designers help the NHS is through visualisation. By bringing issues to life through videos of real staff and patient behaviour, or diagrams illustrating patient journeys and staff workflows, designers can enable those at the coalface to see the challenges in a more vivid and holistic way.
Jason Mesut
For example, we recently worked with nurses and midwives to map out the patient journey through pregnancy. It highlighted every area where the patient experience was most important to mothers-to-be, and where there were issues. This meant the employees were able to come up with solutions to improve the experience themselves; the designers were facilitators rather than creators.
This offers a new approach, given the years of management consultants crunching numbers around the NHS, costing taxpayers a fortune and delivering lots of proof but not much tangible progress.
However, some definite challenges remain. Designers are often less sensitive to positive clinical outcomes and cost-cutting as they are to the softer 'patient experience' sides of a better NHS.
They also often struggle to prove the success of their solutions – both qualitatively and quantitatively. Patient experience, for example, is highly subjective and personal, heavily skewed by a patient's situation in care and their self-reported memories afterwards.
It's harder still for most designers to think in an analytical way about statistics and operational efficiencies. They are too often held back by a historical culture of pushing ideas through on faith, instinctive appeal, or good selling.
That's just not going to cut it in the NHS over the next few years.
For designers to succeed in the NHS, they need to be numbers-savvy or to work with others who are. They also need to balance the benefits of patient experience against the goals of better clinical care at a reduced cost to the taxpayer.
Designers should advocate evidence-based design decisions, like clinicians advocate evidence-based medicine. They then need to focus on the impact to the wider health ecosystem of their ideas. After all, it's a deeply complex environment and change on such a big scale takes time.
In addition, they need to hang around long enough to keep pushing their ideas through to implementation and subsequent evolution. Designers have a great deal to offer the NHS (and vice versa), but it's not as simple as some of them might think.
Jason Mesut is experience director at communications consultancy The Team
