Tero Väänänen, Head of Design at NHS England, has spent nearly thirty years watching the same pattern repeat across finance, telecoms, and now one of the world's most complex health systems. Organisations optimise the capabilities they own. People fall through the gaps between them.

In this conversation, Tero introduces a framework that reframes the whole problem. Healthcare is an infinite game — there's no winning, no endpoint, no final whistle. But we keep designing it with finite rules that were never meant to join up.

We also explore a risk that isn't getting enough attention: how agentic AI could widen health inequality rather than close it — and what we'd need to do right now to prevent that.

Problems Worth Solving is brought to you by Healthia, the collaborative service design consultancy for transformation in health, care and public services.

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