Bridging the digital gap in community health & wellbeing
Well Doncaster is an initiative that tries to address this by bringing local Voluntary Community and Faith Service (VCFS) organisations together with people in local communities to promote increased self-management of chronic health conditions. This means improving awareness and access to local health and wellbeing services (including Doncaster’s network of community coaches) in order to take pressure off primary care services.
The challenge was to help Doncaster City Council (DCC) create a digital platform capable of simultaneously offering a more joined-up experience for residents while supporting the tremendous energy and talent in Doncaster's VCFS organisations.
Following UK Gov Digital Service Standard best practice, we began with a Discovery phase that would investigate the needs of both residents and VCFS organisations large and small. What emerged from Discovery was both fascinating and typical of the problems that many local authorities experience in the evolution of local services. This can be characterised as ‘disjointedness’.
On the service provider side we found a combination of localised national services together with local start-up organisations and voluntary groups. While national services have the benefit of centralised digital communications this contrasts with smaller local organisations who despite having tremendous energy, empathy and expertise, lack the digital marketing and comms resources that the national organisations enjoy - making it more difficult for local organisations to reach local people using digital channels. Community connectors were resigned to having to communicate information about local services and events by word-of-mouth.
For residents this meant that awareness of services in their local community was very low leading to poor uptake and effectively stunting the development and growth of the sector. Unreliable service information is a major problem from every possible perspective. On one hand finding out, the hard way, that a service has changed location, operating hours or is no longer available is a perfect opportunity for vulnerable people to drop out of the support network through frustration and disappointment. This leads to delayed action on the part of citizen leading to exacerbated ill health and potentially a heavier reliance on statutory services at a later date. For the VCFS organisations it means a lost opportunity to develop and grow.
The key problems that we sought to solve in the design were to make it easier for services to collaborate with each other, to implement self management and publication of service information for improved reliability, and, for residents to be able to find services that are relevant to themselves in a morass of health and wellbeing information.
We sought to make it easier for citizens to find services that are localised and relevant to them by implementing an interactive Virtual Coach into the user workflow. The Virtual Coach uses a series of Appreciative Inquiry question sets relating to specific issues in order to find the information, guidance and support most relevant to the individual users’ circumstances. Using this approach the system can cover a huge range of topics and issues that may typically clash or become buried in a generic information system.
The citizen health portal supports organisational referral, self-referral, and ‘Virtual Coach Pathways’ that provides self-diagnosis pathways to service recommendations based on ‘Appreciative Inquiry’ question and answer sets. These can be expanded and extended easily to cover any topic and currently cover personal finance, getting active and reducing social isolation. We use Algolia’s AI based search tools to help users find the services they are interested in which can be favourited and saved for access later. The system supports 3rdparty and self-referral as well as access to Doncaster’s 14 health and wellbeing coaches.
There is a collaborative networking sub-portal for community wealth building for VCFS organisations that includes business development support, grant funding applications, collaboration spaces, service planning & co-ordination and resource sharing. Each service has a profile and services to manage their own entry in the services directory (including mapped and list views) and community events – subject to admin approval.
Self-managed service information and publication is a key element of this system and is necessary to ensure that the public have accurate, reliable service information to deliver joined up community health & wellbeing.
