Problems Worth Solving

Dementia is the UK's biggest killer. Yet around a third of people living with it don't have a diagnosis.
And we're still largely using services designed for a time when there was much less we could do about the condition.
That's beginning to change.
The new Manchester Brain Health Centre is bringing together earlier diagnosis, advanced testing, prevention and personalised support in a very different model of care.
And one of the most interesting things is how even changing the language can make a difference.
Ask people whether they think they can reduce their risk of dementia, and many will say no. Ask whether they can improve their brain health, and they're much more likely to say yes.
In this episode I speak to Dr Ross Dunne, one of the clinicians behind the Manchester centre, and Chris Larkin from Alzheimer's Society, which is helping lead the initiative.
We explored what's wrong with dementia diagnosis today, how the Manchester team is redesigning the experience, and what it would take to bring this approach to the wider NHS.
The science is changing. The challenge now is to redesign services to make the most of what's becoming possible.
Problems Worth Solving is brought to you by Healthia, the collaborative service design consultancy for transformation in health, care and public services.

Find out more about our work at healthia.services.

Dr Neil Churchill OBE is Director for People and Communities at NHS England. He has spent much of his career working across the boundary between the NHS and voluntary sector. His argument is simple: the health service depends on charities far more than it often acknowledges - but those relationships are still too fragmented and transactional. 
In this conversation, Neil introduces Diagnosis Connect - an initiative designed to connect people with specialist charities at the point of diagnosis, rather than leaving them to find support by chance. It raises a bigger question: as the NHS becomes increasingly digital, how do we make sure its real-world relationships with the voluntary sector exist in the digital world too?  
We also explore what the shift towards neighbourhood health means for charities and communities - and why care closer to home can’t be delivered by the NHS alone.
Problems Worth Solving is brought to you by Healthia, the collaborative service design consultancy for transformation in health, care and public services.

Find out more about our work at healthia.services.

Tero Väänänen, Head of Design at NHS England, has spent nearly thirty years watching the same pattern repeat across finance, telecoms, and now one of the world's most complex health systems. Organisations optimise the capabilities they own. People fall through the gaps between them.
In this conversation, Tero introduces a framework that reframes the whole problem. Healthcare is an infinite game — there's no winning, no endpoint, no final whistle. But we keep designing it with finite rules that were never meant to join up.
We also explore a risk that isn't getting enough attention: how agentic AI could widen health inequality rather than close it — and what we'd need to do right now to prevent that.
Problems Worth Solving is brought to you by Healthia, the collaborative service design consultancy for transformation in health, care and public services.

Find out more about our work at healthia.services.

At a radiology AI conference, a clinician described a simple interface choice: an agree/disagree button for feeding back on AI diagnoses. It looked clean and efficient. But it assumed something fundamentally untrue: that clinicians experience a binary internal state when reviewing AI outputs. In reality, what they experience is uncertainty, context, fatigue and gut instinct. And when you force all of that into a binary choice, you don't just create a poor experience. You distort the data training the model.
In this episode, consultant psychiatrist Dr Lia Ali argues that behaviour isn't a surface layer in health technology — it's infrastructure. Drawing on experimental psychology and her work at NHS England, she makes the case that most health AI is built for a version of human cognition that doesn't exist. She calls this the fictional binary human, and she thinks it's one of the biggest unspoken risks in health technology today.
Problems Worth Solving is brought to you by Healthia, the collaborative service design consultancy for transformation in health, care and public services.

Find out more about our work at healthia.services.

Last year, GP teams in England delivered over 380 million appointments — and the pressure is on to deliver even more. But maybe the bigger opportunity isn't making each consultation faster? What if it's rethinking the relationship between a person and their GP?
Dr Shanker Vijayadeva is a practising GP and lead for digital transformation in London at NHS England. He lives on both sides of the system - in clinic seeing patients and leading change across the capital.
In this episode, we explore what he calls "the wider consultation" - the idea that care should start before a patient walks in and continue long after they leave. We talk honestly about what AI is and isn't doing in general practice, why COVID proved the NHS can move fast when it has to, and what happens when you get Age UK to train GP practices on their own technology.
Problems Worth Solving is brought to you by Healthia, the collaborative service design consultancy for transformation in health, care and public services.

Find out more about our work at healthia.services.