Evaluating Co-production in Mental Health Services as a Support for Co-design Activities

Most healthcare managers and professionals ignore how to include and take advantage of design thinking methods to improve services and processes. Yet, initial evidence is emerging about the potential of service design, not only to solve service challenges but also to support organisational change. In the field of mental healthcare, the inclusion of service design approaches was lately fostered by the increasing attention on co-production and patient engagement, as well as by the growing interest towards recovery principles and approaches. This chapter presents an action research project conducted by the Departments of Design and Management Engineering of Politecnico di Milano in collaboration with the Department of Mental Health of Spedali Civili di Brescia (Italy). It focuses on how the introduction of an evaluative component into the service design process supported the set-up of co-design activities aimed at triggering an organisational change in the mental health department. The project is described in its main phases, illustrating how an initial evaluative research, consisting of a qualitative field research conducted both from the user and the organisation perspectives, informed the assessment of co-production promising practices and values. Then, it is discussed how this evaluation approach, when integrated within service design as a practice, can help sensitising and amplifying co-production values, therefore favouring the diffusion of co-production within organisations.