About
Ute is a service designer with a background in social anthropology and design innovation who has been championing inclusive service transformation in health and care for over 7 years. She uses approaches from design and social science to unravel and rethink individual experiences or entire systems, and to involve other people in this process.
At Healthcare Improvement Scotland, she works in partnership with clinical teams to embed a culture of human centred design, and trauma-informed ethical user research practice in NHS Scotland. Previously, she led on ensuring health and care professionals and the people they care for are central to how new data platforms and products are developed at NHS Scotland’s National Digital Service.
Before joining the NHS, Ute worked as part of the Digital Health and Care Institute at The Glasgow School of Art, where she explored how design innovation can address complex issues in health and care.
Talk details
Transforming the NHS is a team sport: Driving collaboration in an old, complex, messy, and changing system
The NHS is a deeply loved and deeply flawed public institution. The last two years have really brought this contradiction home for a lot of us. As a disabled person, the NHS has featured heavily as both hero and villain in my life. And as a service designer at NHS Scotland, I see the reality of how much is left to do daily, and yet, that a kind and caring NHS is entirely in reach. With renewed public attention and digital tools entering this space, we now have a once-in-several generations opportunity to transform and update how we care for one another and how we live with illness.
But how do we get there? How do we reorganise the NHS with people at its heart? This is a story from a different frontline. It happens somewhere at the intersection of research, design, data, digital, clinical, patient, and policy expertise. It’s a proposition for how we might better champion human centred work, build bridges between disciplines, nurture inclusive service transformation, and finally turn reimagining health services into a team sport.