A Speculation for the Future of Service Design in Healthcare: Looking Through the Lens of a Speculative Service Design Framework

The future of midwife-led continuity of care: Call for a dialogue

“…This paper offers a detailed and analytical account of the factors that affect MLCC and its multiple possible paths to the future. In general, it is difficult to foresee the future but by thinking ahead through a process of exploring and considering significant trends and developments, different probable, possible and plausible MLCC future alternative situations and outcomes and possibilities emerged [ [17] , [18] , [19] ]. The scenarios are storylines of a future end state of MLCC presented as an interplay of certainties and uncertainties at a point in time or horizon, with the potential to serve as an input for dialogue.…”

“…It is not uncommon for scenarios that emerge from the intuitive logics scenario planning methodology, to highlight negative aspects or sensitive topics of a phenomenon. Although the scenarios are not predictions, good or bad, or science fiction [ 43 ], the scenarios in this paper may cause different responses and heterogenous viewpoints [ 19 ]. Although this paper has a theoretical perspective, it does have practical meaning as it is after this point to focus on stakeholder analysis, that is, the identification of groups to identify participants for future MLCC development [ 51 ], including strategy development, anticipation, adaptive organisational learning, and proactive behaviour of midwives [ 43 , 52 ].…”

“…The scenarios are suitable for a dialogue among student midwives and/or practising midwives and midwifery management as a tool for transformative learning and professional development to unpick and explore the causality of the key variables underpinning the scenarios and gain in-depth understanding of micro-, meso- and micro-level forces in midwifery care [ 32 , 43 ]. Understanding the different causes and their effects as portrayed in the scenarios’ storylines, stakeholders might be nudged to take action to pursue or avoid a certain scenario, including managers and policymakers [ 19 , 43 ]. As MLCC is not a default model of practice [ 5 , 7 ], the scenarios might be an antidote to tunnel vision of practitioners and managers who do not embrace the extensive MLCC evidence, break down paradigms, biases and change the MLCC mindset [ 53 ].…”

“…This methodology is a theoretically phased method of inquiry, that facilitates foreseeing the probable future of MLCC through learning from the driving trends and developments in MLCC, exploring the interconnectedness of situations and eventualities, and to understand what is significant [ [16] , [17] , [18] ]. The phases of the intuitive logics scenario development methodology were followed to make sense of the complexity and chaos of MLCC, through (i) providing a framework to understand trends and developments of MLCC, (ii) understanding what is important for the future of MLCC, (iii) contributing to organisational learning and exploration, and (iv) providing input for an MLCC dialogue [ [17] , [18] , [19] ].…”

“…An intuitive categorisation of the key trends and developments resulted into a theoretical framework structured by two underlying meta dimensions of MLCC with extreme or opposite poles. The last phase of the methodology included writing scenarios that present probable, plausible, and possible future eventualities or situations of MLCC, by combining the extreme ends of the selected dimensions with the key variables [ [17] , [18] , [19] ] (see Fig. 1 ).…”