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Initial concepts and ideas – Student presentations – 31/10/11

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Initial concepts and ideas

Yesterday was the second set of student presentation at The Glasgow School of Art. The purpose of this session was for the students to present their initial concepts  in relation to their themes (social isolation, anticipatory care, re-enablement and partnership and communication). They were looking for feedback from practitioners, older people and and carers about how close these concepts are to creating the life older people would like, the suitability of the concepts in responding to the theme, and their practicality in the south side of Glasgow.

We had a full house of students, a few practitioners in the morning session and more in the afternoon. This meant feedback was limited in the morning and become more fruitful in the afternoon – reiterating that this project really is a collaboration/co-design project – without feedback and practitioners ideas and perspectives it is hard to evolve the concepts into relevant and practical ideas.

Work in the interm

Since the last presentations some of the students have been to visit the Nan McKay Hall where older people get together (see previous blog post), a GP at Midlock Medical Center, practitioners and older people at Cornerstone, and kept in touch with practitioners by email or phone.

Presentations

Each group presented and asked for feedback. We will make the presentations available on the blog asap so you can see the visual presentation of the concepts and how they would fit into a scenario that an older person may experience.

Social Isolation

The first group up was the social isolation group, they presented 3 ‘low technology’ ideas about engagement in the community when you are socially isolated, but are finding this a hard topic to address because it can be quite vast. Following this presentation this group are going to focus on narrowing the scope of the theme and develop concepts that respond directly to the older people’s profiles they have developed.

Furthermore, IRISS are providing some evidence support to assist the group in conceptualizing this issue – focusing on what the literature says about what is useful in overcoming social isolation and loneliness, what meaningful interactions might be as well as the use of technology.

View the presentation: 31_10_ Social Isolation

Anticipatory care

The anticipatory care group have decided to focus upon one area of anticipation – this being thinking, talking and being in contact with ‘old age’ in early years. This group believe that as a culture we don’t think about or anticipate our old age until it is imminent – this is not helped by poor representation of older people in the media and negative portrayals of older people as vulnerable, frail and isolated.

To address this, the group is interested in developing an awareness raising campaign,  which would include activities that bring older people and younger people together through primary and secondary school settings. The aim of this being to break down barriers around knowledge and appreciation of old age, as well as possible inhibitions and fear between these two age groups. This approach really pushes the perspective of anticipatory care back to when people are growing up and what young people want their life to be like when they are older. So although not addressing anticipatory care needs right now, this team are looking more at a futures and generational perspective so the problem experienced at the moment could be alleviated in the future.

Reablement

This group presented 7 concepts called:

  1. Swapping and sharing
  2. Reablement buddy
  3. House swapping
  4. Guerrilla gardening
  5. Audio recording
  6. Generation mixer
  7. Skills sharing

One of the things this group has found difficult is getting to grips with what reablement means in a health setting as we were unable to pursue access to older people who are working with the NHS to enable themselves due to time an ethical constraints.

Therefore this groups has focused on ideas with people who still need support but are possibly not at the acute end of this issue. As a result, most of their ideas are community based – a factor they are going to take into consideration when developing these ideas further (concepts are currently too close to the social isolation group).

View the presentation: layout pres. lunedi.2

Partnership working and communication

This group presented 3 concepts:

  1. Link -  referred to placing someone who has both health and social care knowledge in a GP’s surgery to act as a first point of contact and support a person to navigate the service landscape.
  2. Core team database – looked at combining the social work and health databases but making them person centered so that each person was able to have access and contribute to their records. It also considered employing a team of staff to make sure no one fell through the possible cracks between the two databases.
  3. The Hub – was the less developed of the three ideas but the one idea that most practitioners became quite excited about! The practitioners shared lots of ideas with the students as to what could be in the Hub, how it could work, and what would be there. The concept refers to a local area (hub) that people already use to go about their daily tasks – such as collecting their pension or buying food. The idea involves incorporating representatives from health and social work (or people with this kind of knowledge) than can signpost people to services that can support them or take them as these services would be in the Hub. What was stressed in this concept is that is is more of a community approach to people’s needs with health and social care a secondary (albeit important) element.

View the presentation: Concept_Ideas Partnership working and communication group

 Summary

All of the groups have taken a community perspective when developing these concepts rather than a health or social service based response. This chimes with the underlying approach which focuses on the inclusion of the experiences and aspirations of older people and carers -  it is these factors that the students are able to design for or towards, rather than the services expectations.

More work needs to be done by the students and practitioners to understand how the concepts could possibly complement existing networks, behaviours, actions or services and reconstitute them in some way. They also need to be made contextually relevant to the south side of Glasgow.

In the interim (2)

Ian Grout (the course leader) summarised and visualised how each of the theme’s concepts could sit together into a whole proposal for the future of care. The students need to consider this proposal and decide if they see their themes taking this kind of overall shape. As well as refining the concepts that gained positive feedback, they will work on the overall story of their ideas at the next group session on Wednesday.

 Next presentation

The next presentation session will be held in one of the cares centers the south side.

We are keen to ensure that people who use services and their carers are engaged in the project as much as possible – especially now that ideas are beginning to form. As such we hope that the change of venue will encourage as many people to attend as possible to provide feedback that will help shape and refine the concepts – and so that we can ensure that the concepts are of most relevance to the people that count the most – older people and their carers.

 

 

 

Future Choreography of Care and Support Project Launch!

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Today, in a beautiful building in the south side of Glasgow, 15 practitioners working with older people from across the social services, and 20 students from the Glasgow School of Art came together to begin to think about reshaping the future choreography of care and support for older people in Glasgow South.

This work aims to complement that of the Reshaping Care for Older People agenda and is all about empowering practitioners to come together, to think about the services that they provide differently and to come up with new ideas and ways of working that might provide better outcomes for the people receiving support in this area. Practitioners were from social work services, health, the private sector (Bupa care home) and the voluntary sector (Cornerstone Care).

The new ideas bit, is where the students come in to lend a hand. The 20 students, in their third year at the art school, are busy honing their service design skills and are bringing with them fresh perspectives, creative skills and visualizing capacity. Throughout this project we hope to marry the innovation that is already happening on the front line, with the new tools and methods of service design to help the practitioners work in partnership to develop ideas for the future.

We’ll also be introducing the students to older people and their carers so that they can get a better picture of their lives from their perspective (more about that on Wednesday), and to ensure that anything that is produced through the project is truly co-produced.

The Launch

Today marked the start of a 7 week project, where these participants will be coming together in 4 teams to focus on the following themes:

  • reablement
  • partnership working and communications
  • anticipatory care – specifically non-admittence to hospital
  • social isolation

We spent time today splitting the students and practitioners into groups, ensuring there was an even spread of experience across each team. Getting to know each other, making sure everyone was on an equal platform, and introducing some of the issues that practitioners are facing was the order of the day.

We presented the policy direction and ethos of the project to the students and asked each team to consider their given theme and to discuss their commitment to the project and the types of elements that they’d like to explore. The commitments were as follows:

1. committed to thinking about partnerships with clients and familes and communicating well with family members

2. committed to the priority of maintaining the couple’s independence and protecting the individual’s right to make choices and to be heard

3. committed to assessing the needs of both the carer and the service user, promoting their indpendence but also increasing their awareness of their options.

4. committed to listening to people and considering the person as an individual (removing any labels) and working together to shape the care and support that the person receives.

After lunch, we gave the teams time to consider the practicalities of how they wanted to go forward as a group, as well as thinking about potential site visits, and information requests. We then all discussed each of the approaches as a group. These were as follows:

Anticipatory Care Team

This team is thinking about how the students will integrate into each of the different sites. They have decided that one student will visit the Bupa care home at a time (to ensure that this does not become overwhelming for the residents). The rest of the students will visit Elder Park (health setting) and Langton Road (social work setting), whilst coordinating this through telephone and email.

Communication and Partnership working Team

This team has decided to create a blog and a facebook group so that they can share ideas readily with each of the other team members (more information on this soon). They want to learn a bit more and get some more information before coming back together as a group – planning to look at the whole process and how each of the different sectors interact with one another.

Reablement Team

This team are planning to meet to create a map of all the different services that exist locally for older people – from a reablement perspective. They also will plan to make visits to the different workplaces. The students and practitioners have given each other homework (!) – each group identifying what they would like to know about the other, as well as becoming clear on the expectations of what they can deliver as a group.

Social Isolation Team

This team will be meeting tomorrow at social work premises to get a better feel for this type of role and the responsibilities that come with it. This will include looking more closely at individual rights, assessments and meeting needs. The students will then be invited to the other settings to get a grasp of things from their perspectives.

What’s next?

Over the next seven weeks the teams will have the opportunity to meet with different groups of older people and their carers, visit different work settings and ask lots and lots of questions as the basis for developing ideas as a team. These ideas will be consistently subject to refinement following group sessions where all project participants come together to get feedback on their ideas.

The teams will be posting up discussion about what has happened including their thoughts, ideas and processes to this blog so keep your eyes peeled for more information soon…. We are really pleased with the start of the project and are excited to see what will happen throughout the seven weeks!

All comments welcome.

*IRISS would like to thank our partner organisations NHS Education for Scotland (NES) and the Scottish Social Services Council (SSSC) for allowing us use of elements from their ‘Sliding doors to Personal Futures’ events. The SSSC and NES are taking forward the workforce agenda part of the Reshaping Care for Older People programme; looking at the kind of workforce we will need in the future, the skills workers will need and how to support future learning.