Designing across organisational boundaries - Community Dentistry Services

This paper considers the potential value of visualisation approaches to describing the complex setting of UK health service provision. Through a case study project, which used Service Design approaches to develop a person-centred view of Community Dental Health Services, two visual models of service provision and their value to project stakeholders are discussed. The first comprised a map of the current structure of UK health service provision, created to guide the project approach and introduce the person-centred perspective; and the second is in the form of a draft Service Blueprint. Together they were used to establish an extra-organisational view of service provision. Findings demonstrate that these visualisations of service effectively widened and held-open the scope of the case-study project and that key policy-stakeholders recognised that Design’s person-centred perspective, worked across the usual organisational boundaries.