Achieving better health outcomes for people living in the London Borough of Southwark
This post is about how the public health and digital teams at Southwark Council are going to be working with our residents to help them to achieve better health outcomes. Health inequalities persist within Southwark, which have a marked effect on the health outcomes of residents. On average, there is a 7-year gap in life expectancy for children born in the affluent parts of the borough compared to those born in the more deprived areas. We intend to build on our successful community face-to-face support by giving access to a suite of digital tools to residents who are motivated to make a change. We hope these tools will support their aspirations for change, improve their health and well-being, and enable them to thrive.
The digital first approach to public health is new to us in Southwark, as traditionally services have been offered in a face-to-face setting. Our intent, supported by our senior management team and local politicians, is to transform public health services, to be person centred and outcome based, tailored to the needs of the individual, accessible and capable of delivering great value for money.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be really open with you about what we’re doing and the approach we’re taking. We hope you can learn from our lessons, and share in our successes and failures.
Where we are now
We have a hypothesis that digital technology in the public health space can support, encourage, enable and facilitate residents to make sustained changes to their behaviours.
We know from Public Health England (PHE) data that some high profile national behavioural change programmes such as Couch to 5K have had great success. What we don’t know, is whether Southwark residents who want to make a change will be open to using digital tools to do so.
Listening to our residents
So before we rush to develop anything, we are going to find out what Southwark residents, motivated to change their behaviour, feel they need to support their aspirations for improved health and wellbeing.
It became evident that we needed to do some research and so we commissioned Comuzi, www.comuzi.xyz a design studio specialising in radical change to work with us. They will help us with a discovery phase where we will do user and desk research and synthesise our insights, together with an ideation phase where we will work up lots of ideas for what the digital service might look like and then filter them down to a few to prototype and iterate with our residents.
Let’s get started
After a few weeks of planning, yesterday we held the kick-off event for the work we will be doing together. It was a fun, interesting, exciting and tiring day. The lovely Akil and Richard from Comuzi took us through a packed agenda, where we compiled a project network map, thought about what our super powers would be in a crisis, looked at risks, and considered what we would deem a success or a fiasco from a council, professional and personal perspective. Later, we thought about what the must, should and shouldn’t deliverables might be, what our challenge questions were and what we wanted the values of our newly formed team to be. Phew! We ended by getting lots of dates in the diary so everyone knows what is expected of them and when, and so that we can give plenty of notice to other colleagues whom we would like to involve.
Looking ahead
We don’t think this is going to be easy. We will be open to hearing some uncomfortable truths from our residents. We are bound to make mistakes, but we are open to sharing them and learning from them. Ultimately, we are committed to delivering change by taking a user-centred approach and listening to what our residents tell us.
