DESIGNING MENTAL HEALTH DELIVERY SYSTEMS: DESCRIBING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SYSTEM COMPONENTS

A challenging area of healthcare delivery in the UK is mental health. There is a growing need to improve outcomes of care. This research is part of an ongoing study that brings Design and Systems Engineering approaches into mental health service design. The focus is on how to understand and describe the architecture of delivery systems. Results from earlier stages of the work, looking at the identification of system components, have been reported previously. In this paper, we report the findings from empirical work on understanding the nature of the relationships between system components.