Five years after the first trip was organised, two of the participating headteachers ran up to me in a hotel and told me that they still think about the tour every day. They can be seen in the video above, which covers the ‘schools’ part of the tour and was intended to enable teachers to stand back and look at schools as a concept. The full programme also included sessions on design thinking, meetings with people who have challenged our conventions about how learning happens, and a look at future technology that could easily be ported into the schools sector.

The idea for the tours originated at a meeting in the UK Department of Education in 2007, where I was introduced to around a dozen headteachers from Wolverhampton Local Authority.

In conjunction with what was then called the National College for School Leadership, they had been asked to go on an overseas study tour, with the findings being used to inform the design of the Building Schools for the Future initiative.

During our first workshop, I asked them to put forward ideas on post-it notes to help populate the itinerary. We then looked at the ideas, judging them according to the extent to which they either looked like or worked like a present-day school. The group quickly realised that 90% of their suggestions both looked like and worked like contemporary schools, which was another way of saying that they were unlikely to find much that was truly transformational by visiting them.

Clearly, there was still much to be learned from visiting recently built schools. However, the group realised that the tour would offer much more value if they increased the percentage of time that fell outside of the ‘looks like us/works like us’ bracket. So they asked me to arrange visits to places that looked like schools but did not operate like them, or worked like schools in places that did not look at all traditional, and even learning environments that neither looked like nor worked like schools.

This was the start of the ‘not like us’ study tour, which has since helped headteachers in England, Australia, Ireland and America to stand back, rethink learning and acquire the design thinking skills necessary to make a success of transformational learning.

If you would like to discuss the ‘not like us’ study tour concept then please feel free to get in touch by emailing tours@stakeholderdesign.com

Co-production is the latest in a series of innovation frameworks that runs roughly as follows:

• Supplier-centred design (“You can have any colour you like, as long as it is black”)
• User-centred design (innovation occasioned by watching people and then designing something on their behalf, thus putting the designer in charge)
• User-led design (in which designers guide people through the process of describing and solving problems for themselves, thus putting the user in charge)
• Co-design (the idea that understanding of a problem and/or solution can be improved if designers, suppliers and consumers look at it together)
• Co-production (a fairly new concept, discussed below)
• Running alongside co-production we also have user experience-led design (aka UX design, which I discuss briefly at the end).

None of these elements can be said to have given way entirely to any successor methodology: for instance, budget airlines like Ryanair have used supplier-centred design thinking with great success, and most of the design effort in areas such as assisted living technologies and urban park design can still be considered user-centred.

The shift from supplier-centred design to user-centred design really began in the 1970s with companies like IDEO. They began by watching people wander round supermarkets, then ran back to their studios where they designed trolleys that could seat a baby. At some point, they also noticed that people were walking past the biscuits, putting some coffee in the shopping trolley, then having to turn round and go back to the biscuits – so they encouraged managers to change the layout of the shop.

By the time I started working at the Design Council in 2003, public services were just beginning to come under scrutiny from the design profession. Designers suspected that these services were very supplier-centric, just as (for instance) the banking sector had been in the 1950s.

The task we had at the Design Council was to build a process by which end users could define both problems and solutions in different areas of the public sector. My area was education. We wondered what would happen if we stopped designing around the needs and preferences of teachers (supplier-centred design) and instead asked the service users (children) to map out new approaches to teaching and learning that would secure their full engagement.

We had some incredible successes, like the 360 degree flexible classroom and the Designmyschool prototype, but we also came to the realisation that user-led design was not the answer. Too often, we saw end-users who lacked training in design and innovation seek to fix known problems of the recent past rather than addressing emerging problems of the future. This led us to the concept of co-design.

Co-design, it seemed to us, created opportunities for designers to push suppliers and consumers to go further than they might by themselves. It was, in effect, an attempt to reduce the likelihood that a user-led design would have a low order and short impact timeframe. The problem was that the term co-design was quickly hijacked in much the same way as the word “sustainable” has been – tagged on to all sorts of pre-existing concepts in order to avoid change rather than deliver it. Faulty stakeholder engagement sessions were re-titled as co-design sessions without there being any change whatsoever in the engagement process. It was a term that people thought they understood and it had the cachet of making them feel cool, like designers, without taking the necessary steps to understand what was involved in being a designer.

In the end, I think that designers came to the conclusion that people were engaging in co-production, which is something very different. Let’s look at the characteristics of both:

Co-design: a design is a plan or method for doing something. The person who discovered that rubbing sticks over tinder can make fire was a designer, and the process was the design. Equally, a person who produces architectural drawings for an office block is a designer, and the plans are the design. Co-design, therefore, occurs when more than one person is involved in drawing up a plan for doing something.

Co-production: production is what happens when the raw materials needed to do something are brought together and combined to generate something new. Working out what to do is design work; doing it is production. So the person who invented airplanes is a designer, but a person who assembles them is a producer. Co-production occurs when more than one person is involved in making something happen.

It is for this reason that some designers have begun to use the term co-creation to encompass the entire process of design and production.

There is, of course, a lot of overlap. When designers have an idea for something new, they have to try to make it. Doing so generates insight into what is working and what needs to be fixed. This process is present even when we are deciding what clothes to wear on a first date. Each prototype becomes the focus of a new design process aimed at overcoming problems. Eventually, the designer is left with a plan for the efficient combination of different items in order to serve a defined purpose. This can then go into single or mass production.

Here, then, are some ideas on what makes co-design work or fail, and what co-production really is:

• Co-design is an attempt to define a problem and then define a solution; co-production is the attempt to implement the proposed solution; co-creation is the process by which people do both
• Co-design will fail where one of the parties lacks either the willingness or ability to think like a designer. This happens far too often and is best remedied by using something like Stakeholder Design’s Innovation Readiness Indication Scale (IRIS).
• Co-production offers huge scope for reducing the failure rate of particular scenarios. For instance, in a GP’s surgery, a patient and the doctor can agree a programme for weight loss that includes some dieting, some tablets and some exercise. If this prescription for change is generated by a process of dialogue and agreement, it has far more chance of succeeding than if the doctor simply instructs the patient to adopt it.

What, then, of experience-led design (UX design)? It is also being carved up. If a doctor asks the patient how a particular drug is affecting them, he or she can then amend the precription, using the patient’s experience to improve the design. If a transport chief tries waiting at a bus stop for an unknown number of minutes, the outcome may well be a display that says how far away the next bus is in minutes. Both examples improve the end user’s experience of a service.

Experience-led design is the process by which a group or an individuals’s experience of a space, system, product or service is enhanced. It may or may not require the active involvement of those groups and individuals, or those who are shaping their experiences. It may be compromised by attempts to improve the experience within an unchallengable context (for instance, improving a lesson but insisting that it takes place in a classroom). However, when the problem is set in the future it offers almost limitless possibilities to be a designer. The caveman who rubbed the sticks together to make fire was either cold or hungry – he wanted a different experience of life, so he designed one.

Imagine how different your world could be if that was how we approached public service design.

Stakeholder Design created and facilitated stakeholder engagement sessions with children and parents, stretching and enhancing their aspirations for future healthcare and championing their views within the Acorn consortium. The consortia comprised John Laing, Laing O’Rourke and Interserve, supported by BDP (architects) as well as numerous medical consultants, engineers, finance specialists and logistical planners.

A bespoke process was created to take account of different age groups, health needs and the time pressures that naturally exist in one of Europe’s biggest and busiest children’s hospitals.

As a specialist hospital, Alder Hey provides 275,000 episodes of care to children and young people every year. It has an international reputation as a Centre of Excellence for children with cancer, heart, spinal and brain disease. However, this outstanding care is currently being provided in buildings which are almost 100 years old and are not fit for providing modern day services.

As an Investing in Children hospital, Alder Hey was keen to ensure that children were fully involved in developing the plans.

Louise Shepherd, Alder Hey Chief Executive said: “The designs for the hospital have been inspired by children and it was a drawing from one of our patients which inspired the design we will see today. We felt it was really important to design this hospital with the help of our children who have been involved throughout the development phase. They have helped our bidder to get the design right for children and young people. The new hospital will be fantastic for our patients, families and staff and enable us to achieve our ambition as an internationally renowned children’s hospital.”

The new £237 million children’s hospital will blend seamlessly with an adjacent park

Lead Architect for the project at BDP, Benedict Zucchi said; “Our design concept has not only captured the imagination of children, parents and staff but has also demonstrated itself as a flexible and effective approach, which has evolved through a significant number of user engagement meetings and allowed us to fine-tune the clinical layouts and optimise adjacencies to an unprecedented level.”

The new hospital has been specifically designed to blend seamlessly with a much-loved park that runs alongside the proposed site. It plays to the imagination of children as an exciting and friendly place to be. As Programme Director David Powell explained: “Moving next door to Springfield Park will mean the building can blend into its surroundings and become a hospital in the park. There will be views of the park from most windows and every child will be able to see green space / nature from their room. The development will also give the local community a new and better park than what they have now. Along with much better facilities for our patients, there will also be better facilities for parents and families including more parents’ rooms, plenty of gardens and a 150 seat restaurant facility.”

Speaking on behalf of Acorn, John Laing’s Director of Healthcare Projects, Peter Ward, said: “We’re delighted to be working with Alder Hey to develop the new hospital, giving the Trust’s staff and patients a hospital that matches the quality of their care.

“Its unique and instantly recognisable design will help promote Alder Hey’s care, teaching and research across the UK and internationally, and give children and their families the very best therapeutic environment.”

The new hospital will have a floor area of 60,000m2 and will have 270 beds, including 48 critical care beds for patients in ICU, HDU and Burns.

There will be six standard wards with 32 beds. Each ward will have two four bed bays and 24 single rooms on each ward. That means the majority of children will have their own room with en-suite facilities.

The new development will also include a multi-storey car park with 1200 spaces, 200 more than the current site.

Launching “We Made This” in Cork, Ireland

Nuns have put their faith in a business process used by Nike and Apple to transform their convent into a centre for tackling social problems – the first of its kind in the country.

The Presentation Order in Cork threw open the doors of its historic Evergreen Street complex last night to unveil details of the remarkable project.

The nuns confirmed they planned to enact some of the most innovative suggestions at their convent, which will be redeveloped as a multi-faith community support centre over the next 12 months.

They invited Travellers, recovering addicts, former inmates and immigrants to work with internationally renowned business design strategist Sean McDougall on the project.

Together, they used design strategies that were used to revolutionise the design of Nike’s trainers and Apple’s iPod to develop their own social services. Some of the projects planned include:

• a mental health and nutrition project run by Travellers for Travellers
• a project to help reduce tensions between the elderly and teenagers
• the development of an art gallery focused on community perceptions of Cork from the views of young people, recent immigrants and the unemployed
• and gardening classes and other clubs aimed at supporting integration

South Presentation convent was founded in 1775 by Nano Nagle. Her remains are buried within its grounds.

At one time, 50 nuns lived and worked in the community, providing education for the deaf, a refuge for the elderly and meeting spaces. But numbers have dropped to just five.

However, the sisters said there is still a need for direct engagement with the community.

Sister Anne Coffey said more and more services were being created by people who live at a distance from those they are trying to support.

“We took a leap, in faith, to show what happens if you put your trust in people to come up with their own solutions,” she said.

“We are so pleased with the outcomes that we will be putting some of the findings into practice straight away.”

Mr McDougall congratulated the nuns for their amazing foresight and commitment.

“For the first time, ordinary people in Cork have been using the design techniques that led IBM to abandon super-computers in favour of the PC, and established Apple as the coolest company on the planet,” he said.

“They have shown incredible innovative spirit and proved design techniques can be used to address issues of acute social need in Ireland.”

“If the state wants better outcomes and better social services, all it has to do is change the way in which it talks to people.”

Mr McDougall, from Belfast, is Managing Director of Stakeholder Design, and international innovation agency focused on education and the public services.

He worked previously at the Design Council in London, where he helped to develop the concepts of ‘user-led’ design and social service innovation.

He also used design to transform the face of education in Britain.

He encouraged the British Government and their school managers to focus more on how good design could improve educational outcomes.

They focused on the design of school furniture and classrooms, on the management and operation of schools, on communication techniques and on lesson length.

He encouraged teachers to work with students to make classrooms and lessons more attractive.

He also works with the Futurelab think tank and with global computer giant Cisco Systems.

We are presently planning to launch sister projects in six European countries. If you would like to be involved, please get in touch.

Download the stage one report:  We Made This

Original article published in the Irish Examiner. Thenks to Des for allowing use of the picture.

It’s 7.30am and I’m standing in the conference room at St Thomas’ Hospital in London. In an hour’s time, 200 delegates from all over the UK are going to come into the room as we relaunch the National Foster Care Association as the Fostering Network. Our beautiful height charts have been hand folded that morning to stop the ink smearing (yes, they’re that fresh). There’s just one problem left: the joiners who assembled the ‘wrap’ to go around the main speaker’s plinth put the hinges on back to front. We have a beautiful new logo, but it is pointed inwards towards the plinth, while the audience has a perfect few of some MDF and a couple of screws.

I think back nine short weeks to when I started work. My first job had been to convince the rest of the senior management team to go for the orange logo rather than the more conservative, but less surprising, purple house with a heart on it. It’s a truism that, faced with a new identity they weren’t expecting, employees react as if it was a tiger leaping out of the undergrowth to get them. Meanwhile, those we are seeking to influence are forever on the lookout for something different to grab their attention.

As the new boy, I carry a certain amount of influence and am able to carry the day. However, I get an inkling of the size of the task ahead of me when someone mentions that two of the people who founded the charity round a kitchen table in 1974 still work there. Proud of their achievements (and rightly so) they were concerned that the new identity might usher in some kind of hostile takeover of their cause.

This very understandable fear is more than matched by my own sense of lemming-like progress towards oblivion. “You want to launch the magazine as well?!!” You want to hand out a booklet explaining why we’ve changed our name?” “You want folders and a stage-set, a plinth-mount, new headed paper and and branded presentations?” “IN NINE WEEKS?!!!” Staff are equally aghast. Yet here we are. Job done. Almost

Stage one involved sitting down with our publications team. “It can’t be done,” they said. OK, I replied, but let’s just draw up a list of all the things we’d have to do to make it happen at some point in the future. We went through all the stages. Right, now you say we’d need to develop style sheets for the magazine – how long would that take? And we need to edit the text for the launch publication – can we do that in time?

On and on we went, until we realised that we had precisely nine weeks to do nine weeks of work – no delays, no hiccups allowed.The scale of change was quite incredible. The charity had been founded at a time when most looked like extensions of government departments. Publications had blue covers and everything was conveyed using words; charities gave themselves long names with incomprehensible acronyms – the NCCL, the NFCA. The 21st century demanded something more immediate and comprehensible; NCCL became Liberty; we became the Fostering Network

Relentlessly, we advanced on our targets. The Powerpoint templates were easy so long as everyone stuck to the word counts (the text had to be readable by a middle-aged foster carer at a distance of 25 metres). But the launch publication was a nightmare. 2500 words and not one image to go with a new identity that was anchored in emotion. Somewhere along the line I’d had the idea of presenting it as a height chart – beautiful pictures on one side with space to record the height of different looked-after children; and on the other side, the story of the growth of the charity measured in years. But there was only room for 800 words. Editing was conducted on a needs-must basis; we got it down to 1100 and somehow made it fit, while the author wondered why we were slicing up a perfectly good text.

As the launch day approached, we heard that the 10,000 height charts we had ordered would not be machine foldable until the day after the conference. “What if we folded 200 by hand?” I asked – one for each delegate. Thus we found ourselves using plastic rulers to mark the folds, trying not to smear the ink as we went. Fatalism had by now given way to a sense of invincibility. We were surrounded by boxes of beautiful looking magazines, the stand was already in place. All we were waiting for was the plinth.

And so, at 7.30am I’m staring disaster in the face when David Riches – one of the best graphic designers I’ve ever worked with – bails me out. He’s shouting at the joiner on the phone. They’ll be here in 20 minutes. Oh, and here’s some white tape to cover up the screwholes.

Eight hours later it’s all over. My boss turns to me and says “Well, you can start thinking about next year now!” I’m thinking it was the hardest, but most exhilerating, race of my life to date.

Six months later David’s company – Visible Edge – got an award for best brand identity whlle we got one for best implementation at Marketing Magazine’s inaugural awards..

The cure for economic pain is pain itself, says Sean McDougall

Can you remember when climate change was a cost and not an opportunity? Sir Nicholas Stern (of the Stern Review) changed that. He showed that the cost of averting disaster was far less than the cost of living with the consequences, and that green energy represented a huge economic opportunity for the UK economy.

As Chair of Pain UK – a new alliance of medical charities – I took Stern as my point of reference last week when speaking about the societal impact of pain at a conference in Copenhagen. Incredibly, I found that the depressive effect of chronic pain is so great that eradicating it would lift the country out of recession. Last year, for example, back pain cost the British tax-payer £12.3 billion – equivalent to 0.5% of GDP. Yet it was a 0.3% contraction in the economy that tipped the UK back into recession in March of this year.

That £12.3 billion is made up both of costs and lost profits. Most people who injure their backs at work will be off work for several weeks. During that time, the state will pay for visits to the GP, x-rays, physiotherapy and painkillers. Employers find themselves obliged to pay wages and either accept the lost productivity or hire in temporary staff to maintain output.

There are hidden implications too. Take, for instance, the example of a supermarket shelf-stacker who puts his or her back out while lifting a crate of beans. For the sake of simplicity, let us assume that the supermarket incurs costs of £1000 in covering the cost of sick leave, rehabilitation and compensation. Now assume that the profit margin on a tin of beans is one pence. Simply to recover the £1000 outlay, the supermarket now has to sell an additional 100,000 tins of beans on top of its original target. This is a huge burden to impose on companies that are already struggling to deal with the effects of recession.

Across Europe, 500 million working days are lost each year as a result of chronic pain. The economic effect is equivalent to paying half the working population of Portugal to sit at home doing nothing, while asking the rest to make up the difference via impossibly inflated sales targets.

The £12.3 billion (which, we should remind ourselves, describes only one type of chronic pain) also takes no account of the societal impact of pain. To understand what it is like to suffer from chronic pain, imagine having a toothache that will stay with you for the rest of your life, even after the tooth has been removed.

Unsurprisingly, people living in chronic pain are more likely to lose their jobs, be divorced by their partner and die earlier than might otherwise be expected.

Part of the explanation is cultural. Our ‘after the accident’ approach to back care costs us around £5 in lost income for every pound we spend on treatment. In Germany, where they have just discovered that the annual cost of pain management is more than they spent bailing out Lehman Brothers, they are now starting to take the issue seriously. In their case, that means paying healthcare professionals by outcome rather than output. While it may not be to everyone’s taste, tests conducted with 6000 patients in 41 centres showed a 52% reduction in sick leave and around 10% reduction in the cost of healthcare.

On a societal level, we already know that our present care systems won’t work and can’t be afforded. Meanwhile, our sedentary junk food culture is leading people to develop ill-health at an earlier age than ever before. Yet there are already 11 million people alive in the UK today who can expect to live to 100. If we do nothing, we may condemn millions of people to spend fifty years or more self-managing their pain.

Over 100 million Europeans live in constant pain

Travelling back from the conference, I recalled that, not long ago, heart disease was the number one killer in the western world. Today, advances in surgery, drug manufacturing and pace-maker technology have transformed the situation.

I believe that by working together, technology firms, designers, architects and the pharmaceutical industry could similarly define a new landscape in which people (starting at school) were given habits that would help them to avoid, delay, manage and hopefully recover from chronic pain.

As people entered into old age those same firms would enable them to live enriched lives, delaying the day when they required permanent residential care. The design of our streets would change to suit the needs of the elderly; the Zimmer frame would give way to low-profile exoskeletons that provided support and protected fragile hips; and a new type of doctor – the GPP, or General Pain Practitioner, would be on hand in every practice to help people control their pain and maintain their place in society.

These examples are the healthcare equivalent of the green economy. They may seem fanciful to some; others will see the export opportunities and rub their hands in glee. Wouldn’t it be nice if the cure for economic pain turned out to be pain itself?

Sean McDougall is Chair of Pain UK – an alliance of charities providing a voice for people in pain
www.painuk.org

The original article can be viewed here: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/sean-mcdougall/economic-pain-cure_b_1592552.html

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Although the village in which I used to live is mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086, it doesn’t have a village sign worthy of attention – just the rather drab municipal sign shown above. However, the village was awarded a grant to come up with something a bit better. I provided support along with a local stained-glass artist – Bob Thacker – to help our community participate in the design of the sign.

One of the most surprising discoveries of the process was that village signs are actually quite new. Although the iconography tends to be medieval, and village signs are seen as one of those eternal truths of rural life, they only became popular in the early 19th century. Up until that time people didn’t travel much, so there wasn’t much need to tell people where they were – they already knew.

The advent of mass travel led villagers to create ornate pictograms that were placed on a pole at the entrance to the village. The signs helped to embed an emerging sense of English national identity – images harked back to a idealised past featuring knights, geese, harvests and crests. And, like most great ideas, the village sign has now succeeded to such an extent that it is almost impossible to image an alternative form for them.

From a design perspective that makes things both easy and hard. When things are settled to the extent that they are unchallenged, people sometimes treat them as unchallengeable – as if someone has passed a decree stating that the design must forever remain unmodernised. Examples abound: cathedrals; cutlery; Parliament; schools. Rather than starting again with any of these, we pursue incremental development that leaves the core untouched. When the core design works (for instance in our system for measuring time) one might decide to leave well alone. But the fact of longevity should not be allowed to prevent even a consideration of alternatives, especially when the passage of time has brought into being ideas and tools that make the original concept seem incomplete.

Here are some of the problems that link village signs with rural isolation:

• If the format of the sign is regarded as unchallengable, then the likely consequence is that it will be backwards-looking rather than forwards-looking. This can result in children (particularly teenagers) feeling that the village belongs to another age group. Asking them to help draw it will not help: in ten years time all that will remain will be an image of a bygone era.
• We’ve discovered that while the over 40s like traditional village signs, the under 13s like totem poles telling the history of the village over generations. But opting for one over the other automatically creates winners and losers. We need a process that sets aside initial preferences and allows genuine merging of ideas to occur..
• The format and location of meetings is important. Most people are loath to attend anything that they perceive (rightly or wrongly) to be a rubber-stamping exercise. Bob put a major effort into inviting every person in the village to come along and consider alternatives.
• Our first session was held at the village institute, which is located at one end of the village. We will be doing follow up sessions in the pub (central) and school (age groups) to broaden participation. The process will change according to location, available time and age-group. Depending on the geography of any particular village, there may be questions over where to locate the sign. Our own discussions have revealed pockets of activity and inactivity across the village. There is a danger that this can translate into retrenchment, whereby new initiatives are placed at a distance from those who are not expected to use them. In the long term this can reinforce the non:-participative tendency of those who feel left out (even if others feel they are staying out).
• If the village sign is created as an aid to travellers it is effectively there as a service to people who don’t live in the village. By way of contrast, a sign that provides information on upcoming events, or which can double as a Maypole, can help to bring the community together.With all this in mind, I put together a presentation showing many different types of village sign, ranging from the traditional to the frankly conceptual. As well as the ‘pic on a pole’ it showed statues, totem poles, gangland graffiti and computer controlled signs that can point to any object in the universe. Local residents narrated each slide to demonstrate that it really is a community initiative.
• The participatory design process outlined in the presentation enables all the villagers to identify common values, consider alternative expressions of those values, consolidate ideas and settle on a finished design. Bob and I ran the first workshop and were delighted when just under 30 people (10% of the village) turned up over the course of three hours.

Half of all adults aged 18-35 now experience back pain. The cost to society is around £12.3 billion a year. As Acting CEO of BackCare I fronted new research for the ‘Can You Feel My Pain?‘ campaign linking it to the ‘sit still’ culture in our schools and offices. This is what the Daily Telegraph made of it:

‘Back pain ‘timebomb’ in store due to ‘sit still’ culture’ by Stephen Adams.

A “sit still” culture in schools and the workplace is leading to a “healthcare  timebomb” of back pain in young people, a charity warns today.

Half of 18-to-34-year-olds now regularly suffer from back pain, found a survey of almost 2,400 people across Britain.

Over 100 million Europeans live in constant pain

Here are some facts about the impact that chronic pain has on individuals, families and society as a whole. I’ll be speaking about this at the 2012 Societal Impact of Pain conference in Copenhagen, which runs from 29-31 May – the full programme is available here.

• Incapacity benefit already costs the UK economy £6.7 billion pounds a year and is increasing at the fastest rate ever.
• Chronic pain is often seen as a component of other conditions and, when it comes to funding services and even GP training, it is often overlooked. Yet, one in seven people suffers from chronic pain and 20% have done so for more than 20 years. These genuine cases of immobility contribute to 4.2% of the working population – that’s 2.6 million people – being on incapacity benefit, equating to a cost of £6.7 billion.
• On average, pain education constitutes just 1% of programme hours for undergraduates, yet one in five of their patient consultations involve discussion of pain.
• Across Europe, around 100 million people are living in constant pain. The economic cost of mismanaged pain is roughly equivalent to that of the recession in terms of lost opportunities to work. The societal impact, in terms of shortened lifespan, broken marriages and loss of self-esteem is inestimable.
• Provision for chronic pain in the UK is limited and varying, despite the number of people suffering; currently only half of reported pain clinics offer Pain Management Programmes e.g. The Pain Toolkit.
• The “Road Map for Action” outlines seven key policy dimensions on how EU institutions and member states could effectively address the societal impact of pain at both EU and national levels. More information on the EFIC SIP meeting is available at: www.sip-platform.eu

Register for SIP 2012 at: http://www.regonline.com/sip-copenhagen

Well, help is at hand (nearly). Later this term, Stakeholder Design will be publishing a new booklet on school design called “It’s Not About the Building.” Authored by Sean McDougall and Iain Hulland (a former UK headteacher of the year), it outlines a whole series of easy-to-implement strategies that are designed to drive up educational standards – fast.

Even better, it’s free to anyone signing up to our newsletter before 30 May 2012.

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