Co-designing health and social care services in Grimsby
Grimsby lies in one of the most deprived areas of Lincolnshire, so they say. It has high levels of obesity, substance abuse and chronic ill-health and despite cases of urgent need, a significant amount of residents don’t use any of the local health care provisions.
The North East Lincolnshire Primary Care Trust (PCT) decided to develop a new service offering to increase access to essential health services for vulnerable groups, including problematic drug users, sex workers, offenders, economic migrants and asylum seekers. Engine was asked by the independent researcher and design strategist Martin Bontoft to help develop a service programme and bring it into the most deprived local communities.
An entirely collaborative approach lay at the heart of this project - one where people would work together to co-design the services they need. A variety of research techniques were employed to gather views, issues and problems and to turn these into potential design opportunities. These included feedback probes, co-creation workshops with service users and providers, expert interviews and observational studies.
Feedback probe on ‘Hope Street’ (working title of the project)
The findings showed that all the groups shared simple needs, mainly concerned with emotional, social and low level mental health issues. The findings also indicated a lack of trust towards the NHS in general, although the stakeholders were able to identify an individual with whom they had a productive relationship. The resulting service suggestion ‘Open Door’ emerged from this work. It was built around a place of safety - somewhere warm, safe and non-judgemental - where a variety of services are designed to address peoples needs. Different touchpoints were developed to increase access, so that the user groups could begin to better manage their health.
The Department of Health has judged this project worthy of ‘Pathfinder’ status, which provided extra funding and expertise during the projects implementation phase.
