Storytelling as a Way to Design and Innovate Healthcare Services for Children

Large construction projects are underway at Lapland Cen-tral Hospital, the northernmost hospital offering both primary healthcare and specialist care in Finnish Lapland. As a service provider, the hospital also covers healthcare services for children. One ongoing integration is focusing on chil-dren’s hospital services by providing psychiatry as an integral part of somatic care. The children’s hospital offers opportunities for innovative and creative approaches to explore storytelling as a way to innovate healthcare services with children. This study explores fiction-based research practices and how they can be adapted as a visual service journey mapping tool, which is a commonly used method in service design. This chapter discusses how children can be involved in planning hospital services through creative storytelling, how ser-vice design can be used to produce imaginative materials and analysing the data produced during creative design processes. As an outcome, a fiction-based storytelling method and visual service journey mapping tool will be presented as the result of using the materials of the children’s service design process in hospital settings in Finland.