Misalignment in Healthcare: The Hidden Costs
And why pictures might just be the missing prescription.
“We’re the unsung heroes...the secret tool of patient care. - The Cinderella Service.”
In healthcare, clarity isn’t a luxury, it’s a lifeline.
We all know the stakes. When communication breaks down in the NHS, it's not just systems that suffer, it’s people. Missed signals. Duplicated work. Delays that ripple out. And beneath it all? A creeping misalignment that turns well-meaning teams into disconnected silos.
But what if that cost—of miscommunication, of complexity, of never quite being on the same page—wasn’t just frustrating. What if it were fixable?
Enter Kyle Winn and the Cinderella Service.
Kyle leads one of the NHS Pathfinder projects for aseptic pharmacy services in the North East of England. His team prepares chemotherapy and monoclonal antibodies behind the scenes—it’s critical, life-saving work, but often invisible to the wider NHS. Even to colleagues down the hall.
“We’re the unsung heroes,” Kyle says, “the secret tool of patient care.” Not his words at first—they started with “secret weapon,” until a sketch reframed that idea. “Weapon” felt wrong. Cold. So we changed it. Made it visual. A Swiss Army knife: precise, adaptable, quietly essential.
That’s what this project was all about: reframing. Reconnecting. Revealing.
Three minutes that said what 40 couldn’t
Kyle and his team had tried it the usual way. PowerPoints. Reports. Forty-minute presentations. Then we made a three-minute animation.
“That film does more than explain,” Kyle said. “It sells the project. It brings people in. Staff see themselves in it. Ministers see the big picture. And patients finally see what happens behind closed doors.
Visual storytelling didn't just help them describe the pathway—it helped define it.
The cost of not showing the story?
Let’s be blunt: if people don’t understand what you do, they won’t support it.
Misalignment costs:
Nursing hours, trapped in treatment rooms instead of spent at the bedside.
Recruitment bottlenecks, because job ads don’t capture purpose.
Project delays, as trust boards hesitate on unfamiliar territory.
Burnout, as passionate people drown in explanation loops.
Kyle’s project faced all of these. And visual thinking became the breakthrough. Not as a garnish—but as a gear shift
When drawings drive decisions
A single image stuck with Kyle: a nurse trapped in an hourglass, running out of time. It became a symbol. A shared language. A rallying point.
That metaphor, drawn not said, helped shift strategy. Helped win buy-in. Helped spark conversation—not just inside the team, but with national stakeholders, policy leads, and potential recruits.
And that’s the real point: pictures don’t just decorate ideas—they align people around them.
Healthcare needs shared sight, not just shared files
Kyle’s journey is proof. Visual thinking didn’t replace strategy. It revealed it. It took a complex, highly specialised project and made it emotionally resonant, clinically accurate, and publicly compelling.
His son, aged seven, watched it and understood what Dad does at work. “There’s a job in drawing,” Kyle told him, smiling. There’s a job in clarity, too. A calling, even.
So what's the real cost of misalignment?
Lost time. Lost trust. Lost impact.
The fix? Start with alignment.
And to align, you need to see.
We all know the stakes. When communication breaks down in the NHS, it's not just systems that suffer, it’s people. Missed signals. Duplicated work. Delays that ripple out. And beneath it all? A creeping misalignment that turns well-meaning teams into disconnected silos.