Fireside Chat | Systems Thinking, Human Feeling: Designing Healthcare Services that Work Better for Everyone

This fireside chat will explore how a user-centred, systems-thinking approach can support more effective services. Drawing on lived experience, design practice, and system-level insight, the discussion will examine where current approaches fall short, why digital alone does not deliver integration, and what must change to design services that genuinely improve outcomes across primary, secondary, and community settings.

The conversation will focus on collaboration, trade-offs, and real-world constraints, offering senior leaders practical perspectives on how to design services that work better for patients, clinicians, and the wider system

Key learning points:

• Why healthcare services fails at the point of use: How fragmentation, siloed decision-making, and process-led design undermine patient experience
• The role of user-centred systems thinking: Why focusing on both lived experience and system constraints is critical to designing services that can scale and endure
• How poor design actively widens inequality: The ways digital services can exclude people when accessibility, inclusion, and real-world behaviours are not considered from the outset.
• What leaders can change now: Practical shifts in mindset, governance, and collaboration that can improve services within the next 12–24 months.