Enhancing Service Innovations and the Well-being of Employees in Healthcare Support Services

Our paper focuses on efforts to create innovations in healthcare support services, which has so far been of marginal interest in the context of healthcare innovation research. Public organizations tend to organize support services as public business enterprises. The management and employees of these service centres need a new attitude and work routines in order to offer high quality, efficient, and innovative services. We describe a process for initiating service innovations in a service centre which employs nearly 1000 people and offers administrative services such as documentation, customer services, payroll, human resource management, finance and accounting. In the service innovation process we combined methods, tools and resources from developmental work research, innovation management and customer-orientated service design. We learned that service employees were eager to act as innovators of their own services, when they were given the permission, time, space and tools to create them. The process also facilitated discussions within and among teams, as well as work engagement and the development of the overall picture of service processes and how they interact with the customer’s world. 1 Finnish Institute of Occupational Health FIOH, Topeliuksenkatu 41 a A FI-00250, Finland, [email protected], phone +358 30 474 2546, gsm +358 40 7162520