#ISSS2017 Vienna

#3149 Systems Thinking for Community Involvement in Public Health and Health Service Design (PLENARY)

Gerald Midgley Centre for Systems Studies, Business School, University of Hull, UK In this presentation I will discuss the value of systems thinking, focusing in particular on the involvement of multiple stakeholders, including members of local communities, in decision making on complex health issues. I will outline a methodology for systemic intervention, which supports people in exploring values and boundaries for analysis, and offers methods for opening participation to members of local communities who may have no previous experience in planning or management. In principle, this is systems thinking for everyone; in practice, the boundaries of participation need to be the focus of critical and systemic exploration, given that it is usually impossible to involve literally everyone. Systemic
intervention also emphasises the creative mixing of methods drawn from multiple paradigms, and this might involve quantitative methods from the traditional sciences sitting alongside systems approaches for service design to make intervention much more flexible and responsive to stakeholder and community concerns than it might otherwise be. This methodology will be illustrated throughout my talk with practical examples from my teams’ projects on public health and social systems design in both the UK and New Zealand.