Transforming care services

cxpartners has been working with Bristol City Council for the last 4 years, helping the team there to embed user centred practices throughout their service change programme. We worked together on a number of services starting with those where there was the highest demand such as Parking and Council Tax. With each service we gained a better idea of what the people of Bristol want from the council and fed this back into the next service.

A sensitive approach

We had honed our user-led approach for transactional services, talking to people up front about their needs and then iterating ideas with their feedback. But when it came to something as sensitive and complex as Adult Care Services there were concerns about how transferable this approach would be.

Sharing our learnings

Myself, Tracy Dodds (Digital Services Manager from Bristol City Council) and Sonia Moore (Care Act Lead from Bristol City Council) spoke at Service Design in Government Conference last week. We talked through our approach and shared how we involved vulnerable groups of people.

Empathy through careful research and collaboration

It was vital that we heard from both Carers and those people using care services in order to make sure any future services were designed around their needs. We carefully planned the project to allow people to share their stories in a safe and respectful space.

We turned what we heard from people into experience maps and compound profiles and used these with the wider Better Care team. This was a cross-disciplinary team including people from public health, NHS, front line social workers and service managers.

We asked the team to walk through people's stories and identify their questions, needs and pain points. We then asked them to imagine they had no budget or infrastructure constraints and to rewrite people's stories to make their experiences as good as they could be.

This was a real highlight of the project. We were able to convey the full end-to-end experience of what it felt like to engage with care services in Bristol and had the right people in the room to begin actioning change.

I’m immensely proud to have been involved in this project, the output of which will help guide future decisions for adult social care in Bristol.