Thinkpublic: public service
and communication design

At thinkpublic we are passionate about improving how users experience healthcare. Mark Mugglestone, from the NHS Institute for Innovation, alerted us to a project called “Second Health” which aims to provide a unique experiential standpoint from which to look at health services.

Second Health is a virtual hospital within the virtual world ‘Second Life’. The project is run by the UK’s National Physical Laboratory, Imperial College London and aims to provide “an experimental, innovative and efficient means of communicating complex healthcare messages as well as illustrating what healthcare of the future could look like”

Although I disagree that you can replicate real patient and staff experiences in a virtual world such as this, I do believe it could provide an excellent opportunity for the rapid prototyping of new ideas within a safe environment, at very little cost.

Second Life gains a disproportionate amount of press to the number and mix of it’s ‘residents’. It would be interesting to see how something could work within a more heavily populated environment, where the user base is less geek heavy…

If a new version of the classic hospital management game Theme Hospital were launched which could be used cooperatively over the internet then we could start to see this happen.

How about a public service management game on XBox live?

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