Healthcare has been relentlessly improved but not designed. Guest lecture at WMG launching Daniel Steenstra's book - foreword by Lord Darzi.

Anyone who has tried to change something in healthcare has the same memory: a pilot that worked. It improved something real, the evidence was good, the team believed in it - and then it stopped. It didn't fail. It just never spread.

That pattern is not bad luck, and it is not a failure of effort or goodwill. It is structural, it is predictable, and it can be diagnosed.

Join Daniel Steenstra at WMG for the launch of Design Thinking for Healthcare: A Practical Guide to Healthcare Transformation (Routledge / Productivity Press, 5 October 2026), with a foreword by Lord Darzi.

In this diagnostic lecture, Daniel sets out why transformation programmes stall at the same point again and again — and what clinicians, managers and executives already have in their hands to do about it. You will leave with a framework you can apply on Wednesday morning, not a sales pitch.

Who this is for

NHS trust and ICS leaders, clinicians, healthcare managers, medtech and industry partners, researchers, and anyone responsible for making change actually stick in a health system.

The evening

17:30 — Drinks reception

18:00 — Welcome, and WMG Health Innovation

18:15 — Lecture: why healthcare transformation fails, and what you already have to fix it

18:50 — Questions from the floor

19:10 — Reception resumes, with a book signing

20:00 — Close

About the speaker

Daniel Steenstra spent nine years in clinical training in Amsterdam, then eleven as a professional designer - at Carrozzeria Michelotti in Turin, and at Jaguar in Coventry, where he project managed the interior design of the XK8.

In 1997 he moved a few miles across Coventry, from Jaguar's Whitley studios to WMG, to teach design thinking to engineers. He stayed twenty-five years. And it was at WMG, in 2003, that the third strand came back: he founded and led the £5.7M HealthTech programme, helping West Midlands companies move into the health sector - and returning him to the medicine he had trained in two decades earlier. He went on to become the Royal Academy of Engineering's first Visiting Professor in Medical Innovation.

Medicine, design, academia - three strands that rarely meet in one career. WMG is where they converged, and this book is what came of it.

Practical notes

Free to attend, but registration is required — the room has a fixed capacity.

Registration closes Sunday 4 October.

Copies of the book will be available to buy on the night, and Daniel will be signing during the reception.

Please let us know about access or dietary requirements when you register.

Campus car parks use automatic number plate recognition — register your vehicle at Reception on arrival for free parking.

The book publishes on 5 October. This launch, the following evening, brings it back to the site where its healthcare work began. Seats are limited — please register in advance.

Description supplied by the event organiser.