Supporting Common Ambition to co-design healthcare services with people experiencing homelessness
Project aims:
Inclusively supported the fantastic Common Ambition team and a brilliant steering group of people with lived experience of homelessness to help improve how people experiencing homelessness can access healthcare services in a more accessible and inclusive way.
This project had two main aims. The first aim was to support the team to build Inclusive service design capability and a repeatable project process so the team could continue to improve services going forwards. The second aim was to support the team to create a future service prototype that they could use to start engaging with the wider system and various healthcare services in Brighton to help improve the access to healthcare services for people experiencing homelessness.
Project background:
The Brighton and Hove Common Ambition project brings together people with lived experience of homelessness, frontline providers and commissioners through co-production within homeless health services, in order to improve health services and outcomes for people experiencing homelessness in Brighton & Hove.
Justlife Foundation and Arch Health CIC partnered to make Common Ambition possible!
You can read more about Common Ambitions' previous progress here.
“The steering group operates as a team, every decision is made as a collective, and every group member has a say on what we do, how we do it, and what we are taking forward into the future. Group members have ownership over the direction of the project, but there is no pressure to contribute - people can share if and when they choose to and it’s up to them to contribute in their own way. They are also offered payment for their time, which is important for ensuring a level power dynamic and ensuring that people are reimbursed for the hard work they put in.”
- JustLife team, see more info here
We collectively identified and prioritised challenges
Throughout this project, the Common Ambition team and steering group collectively identified some of the largest challenges people experiencing homelessness face when accessing health care services, we prioritised these and chose an area to focus on for Common Ambition's first service design sprint.
It was hard to choose what to prioritise, we broke it down into two steps - thinking about what we thought would have the most positive impact and then also thinking about what we were in the best position to have an impact on. We collectively chose to focus on making the information available about healthcare services for people experiencing homelessness further inclusive and accessible.
Making information about healthcare services for people experiencing homelessness further inclusive and accessible
The key barrier we identified is that there are lots of places to find information but not many places bring this information together in a consistent way across a variety of services. Often some information like the criteria to access the service, opening hours, and the physical accessibility of services centres was missing.
We co-produced and prototyped a service that could bring together information about a range of healthcare services in an accessible and inclusive way to enable people experiencing homelessness and support workers to find the services that best suit someone's situations and needs.
“Thank you Inclusively! We are so pleased to have found you. The time, care and attention you put into planning our first design sprint and ensuring this was done in a trauma-informed way was such a great start to the project. Each session was explained and delivered brilliantly and it was so good to learn more about service design with each week. Our co-production group loved working with you and we couldn't be more proud of our first prototype!”.
- Nicky Pyper (she/her) Project Manager, Brighton and Hove Common Ambition
Outcomes and impact
The team have been running events to get feedback from wider services and are starting to create partnerships to help push the prototyped service solution further.
Some organisations have already taken some of the learnings and insights uncovered throughout this project and have started to make changes to their services to better meet the needs of people experiencing homelessness in a further inclusive and accessible way.
The other main outcome was building capability and confidence within service design and user research approaches across the team and steering group.
Inclusively is supporting the team with light touch coaching as they prepare for their next Service design sprint - very exciting!
Learnings
Throughout this project co-production was at the heart of everything we did. The first thing we did was ensure that the steering group felt comfortable with me joining the group - Nicky and Nicki had done a wonderful job of creating a lovely space where everyone felt comfortable, open and at ease. To try and make my introduction to the group as enjoyable as possibly I created a little hello video and A4 print-out with a few things about myself and a photo - the steering group said they really appreciated this and it helped to get to know me before I physically entered the group space.
We also created a very visual project process outline that we came back to each week and this really helped to make each phase of the process clear, memorable and helped everyone to prepare for what we were focusing on next.
We also had multiple channels for feedback at all times to ensure everyone felt comfortable to share what was or wasn’t working well. We also ensured that engagement was always as flexible as possible throughout the project.
A big thanks to the Common Ambition team and the wonderful steering group - It has been such a pleasure to work with you to co-create future services. Thank you for welcoming me into the group, sharing your experiences and your brilliant energy.
Client: Common Ambition
Services: Service Design, User Research
Team: Charley Pothecary, Nicky Pyper, Nicki Menin, Steering group of people with lived experience,