Redesigning Public Services
Health: Co-creating services
This is a paper written for RED, a unit established by the Design Council which challenges accepted thinking on economic and social issues through design innovation.
This paper looks at the new challenges facing public services, taking health as a case study. Chronic disease presents a new and growing health challenge. This paper argues that reform to the health services currently on offer cannot address either the management of chronic diseases or the broader lifestyle issues that might promote better health. We argue for a new approach which we call co-creation, because a set of new relationships between users, workers and professionals lies at its heart. Many of the seeds of this new approach can be found within the current system. Communities of the kind we envisage are well developed in software and other fields. We suggest ways in which we could build on these open systems to foster a new form of co-created public service. Our ideas should be considered as work in progress: we hope to develop our model further as we test our approach in practice with partners in Kent and Bolton.
