Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Human Factors
Date Submitted: Sep 2, 2024
Date Accepted: Jul 9, 2025
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Human-centred design (HCD) and digital transformation of mental health services: A narrative review and personal view from the United Kingdom
ABSTRACT
Mental health services face a multitude of challenges, such as increasing demand, underfunding and limited workforce capacity. The accelerated digital transformation of public services is positioned by government, private sector and some academic researchers as the solution. Alongside, human-centred design (HCD) has emerged as a guiding paradigm for this transformation to ensure user needs are met. We define what digital transformation and HCD are, how they are implemented in the UK policy context, and their role within the evolving delivery of mental health services. Our co-author’s involvement in the design and delivery of these policies over the past five years provides unique insights into the decision-making process and policy story. We review the promises, pitfalls and ongoing challenges identified across a multi-disciplinary literature. Finally, we propose future research questions and policy options to ensure that services are designed and delivered to meet the mental health needs of the population.
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.