NICE Dementia Pathway — Design Disruption Proposal
This is a proposal for a workshop to take place at Evolve Business Centre, Houghton-Le-Spring, provisionally set for Tuesday 19th January 2016. Following the discussions between Louise Allen (LA), David Newman (DN), and Daniel Carey (DC).
Purpose
The existing pathway for Dementia Care is reactive — that is, it can only deal with problems after they occur. Providing adequate, individually-tailored support during a crisis is deeply problematic. Providing emergency services is typically much more expensive than pre-emptively assisting patients and their social support networks to identify and mitigate problems before they occur.
This workshop will propose a new stage to the NICE Dementia Pathway — providing preemptive care, advice, and assistance to patients and families in the very early stages of dementia care. This can include helping them to identify the signs of cognitive decline, plan for the future, cope with the changing circumstances brought about by dementia, and seek out appropriate assistance where required.
Participants
The invited participants are the various members of the Dementia Cross Sector Pathways group. It will also be useful for my research if a representative from Newcastle Carers (i.e. Katie Dodd) is invited to attend.
I will also request the assistance of my PhD research colleagues in facilitating the event. This will include them helping to lead group work, discussing ideas with the participants during the workshop, and assisting them in building any artefacts they wish to create (if necessary).
I suggest that the number of participants is limited to around 20 people (not including facilitators); more than this is possible, but will be more difficult to manage.
Format
The workshop will take place in 3 parts:
Pre-event
Around Christmas 2015, all participants will be provided with a notebook containing prompts, provocations, vignettes of patient and carer experiences, principles of design thinking, and other content to be designed by DC. The notebooks will explore the participants’ views on the existing NICE pathway and ask them to propose changes.
These notebooks will not consist solely of straightforward text-based questions and answers, but will ask the participants to explore this idea in more creative, perhaps less familiar, ways. The aim is to prompt the participants into designing innovative ideas which would not be reached through conventional means.
I am also happy to visit each of the participants in the lead up to the event, to discuss their notebooks and what we aim to do at the workshop. This would be useful in ensuring that everyone is fully briefed as to what will be expected of them, and that we hope to achieve, during the workshop itself.
Event
The event will being with a brief introduction to design disruption and the principles behind the project.
Participants will bring the completed notebooks to the workshop, where the books will be pulled apart and the contents discussed collectively.
The participants will engage in group-based collaborative discussions, using the notebooks to identify overarching themes and exploring new ideas to improve pre-emptive support. The participants will be encouraged to propose innovative ideas, with the focus not on whether these ideas are feasible but whether they are different to the status quo.
From the ideas they proposed, each group will be asked to pick a particular idea refine it further, before presenting it to the other groups towards the end of the session. This will be followed by a discussion of the outcomes from each group, how they relate to one another, and how they could be put into practice either individually or collectively.
Post-event
After the event, there will be a further opportunity to discuss and interpret these outcomes. I will then work with DN and LA to design a new stage to the existing NICE Dementia Pathway based on the proposals raised during this workshop.
Further workshops can be considered if the participants feel there is value and potential in the project. The purpose of these additional workshops would be to further refine these ideas and invite other stakeholders to participate in this process.
Duration
The workshop will last approximately 3/4 hours. This is a very short period of time in which to identify and build an entirely new set of services. We need to be realistic and accept that the outcomes of this workshop are likely to be somewhat rough and ready. We must also embrace the notion that the outcomes may be entirely impractical — but see this not as failure but as an opportunity to eliminate ideas which should not be pursued.
Costs
I estimate a total materials budget as a maximum of £500.00.
If hospitality is required (probably not as this is a half-day event) I would estimate that at £10.00 per head. I think it would be useful for me to bill you direct as the event facilitator rather than you making payment to Northumbria University — otherwise it will be virtually impossible for me to access the money!
If hospitality is required then I suggest that you organise this direct with the venue.
If necessary, I am happy to complete the standard quote proposal as provided by DN.