Putting Relationships First – A Different Approach to Designing “People Services”

“People services” are the types of program such as health, education and social services that essentially involve one group of people (providers) providing a range of services to another group of people (variously called clients, consumers, patients or students, depending on the context). The planning for these programs has been dominated, over the past 50 years or so, by the desire to create systems intended to standardize the types and quality of the services provided, in the hope of creating similar outcomes for the clients. In this process, it has been generally assumed that any professional that possesses the appropriate qualifications can provide the required service. What has often been overlooked is the actual relationship that gets created between a provider and a client.