Economical aid journey in Malmö Stad
During the fall we set our foot at “mottaget” or “reception” for the economic aid service in Malmö. Our task was to look into the process for first-time applicants for economical aid.
As always we started with establishing ourselves there, setting up an office next to all the social secretaries and the public reception at the local south agency in Malmö. We started doing interviews with internal stakeholders, citizens who were applying for economical aid as well as social secretaries who do the initial investigations and the ones who make the final decisions on who receives aid. We sat in on in-coming calls. Talked to other municipalities to see how their process was structured. With the knowledge we acquired of the process we mapped how the process of getting economical aid works today.
Early insights were that the process was something like this.
The call
The citizen calls in during sparse opening hours, and a conversation with a social secretary takes place. In interviews with the citizens, they expressed that they expect the initial call some kind of guiding call explaining the next steps of the process, but the social secretary taking the call starts the investigation immediately with a battery of investigating questions. This mismatch is unfortunate and some citizens are taken off and feel that they entered into an interrogation that they did not expect.
After the call
The reception social secretary writes up an initial investigation as well as checks into some very limited available data about the citizen provided by different governmental organizations. There is also the decision if this is a reapplying candidate or a one-time fee being made. 80% of applicants need to be reapplying so they are then matched with a new social secretary out at the local agency. The newly assigned social secretary then often tries to contact the citizen the following day.
The package
The reception social secretary also needs to set up a package of forms for the citizen to fill out containing consent and a more “formal” initiation of the application. Most of the questions in that form are questions that we already asked during the call. Also, the social secretary has a word document containing all possible 72 documents that the citizen could need to provide as proof validating their situation. The reception social secretary personalizes the document list based on the answers from the interview. They then package this up and send it off with the post mostly the same day but sometimes the day after.
Day after the call
The newly assigned social secretary tries to call the citizen to book the first meeting. Unfortunately, the citizen rarely picks up, so the social secretary needs to go on hunting often for a day or two. It does not help that the social secretary is calling from a “hidden” number. Normally the first meeting is then scheduled for a week later since the citizen is still waiting for the postal service to deliver the package of forms and is also expected to bring all the documents and the forms to the first physical meeting.
The form and the attachments arrive
After a few days, the form with the questions and the document list arrives. The post is delivered every second day in Sweden so it has at least passed 3–4 days before they arrive. The citizens witness an enormous frustration during these days of waiting since they just want to get this done, but they don’t know what documents they need to provide yet. They have often already waited “too long” to call the economical aid and are at this stage desperate.
Once the forms and document list arrive they often experience a chock because of the pure number of documents they need to provide. On top of that, the meager amount of explanation of where these can be found or even what type of documents it is does not improve the situation. There is often just a short sentence of which document they need to provide. Examples can be “Your tax declaration.” “A list of all transactions from the last 90 days on all your bank accounts” or “a list of all jobs you have applied to last month”. One citizen expressed the hopelessness of opening this letter and seeing this list of attachments — “The list made me break down, it was just too much and too unclear, I needed to call my daughter and made her take a day off from work to help me out”.
The first meeting
The first meeting takes place generally a week after the initial call. The citizen arrives at the local office with all their documentation. It is the first time the citizen and the social secretary meet and the focus are once again on understanding the situation of the citizen since this “new” social secretary only has seen the report from the reception social secretary doing the initial phone call. Here the citizen also provides all the forms and documents. However, the social secretary rarely has time to go through them during the meeting, but rather does so the day after.
The conclusion of the investigation
The social secretary is now supposed to write up a report on the situation of the citizen which also will lead to a decision based on the information provided. The social department should do this in a timely manner and since it has already passed 8–9 days it is urgent. The problem is that the citizen rarely understands which documents they have should be provided. 54% of all applicants fail to provide sufficient documentation and validation of their situation in the initial application.
This was the reality we were looking at. Something was clearly not working and the experience for the citizen was also sometimes broken. On the other side working with this for a few months I am also honest in that it is one of the most complicated processes I have seen.
Insights
The big insights we were sitting on after the mapping of the service was
- The clients do not know until days 3–4 which attachments they need to provide
- It takes 8 days before a social secretary looks at the attachments and provides feedback if it's the right or wrong ones or if they need more documents.
- 54% of all applicants are rejected because they do not provide the right documents. And for sure some of them might be lacking the sufficient documents to get economic aid but the high number of reapplications show that they rather don't understand which one they are supposed to provide.
The economical consequences of this are that an application takes about 4–6 hours to process and on top of that all communication trying to help the applicant get the right attachments. We received around 4500 new applications in Malmö 2022. When an application is rejected and they reapply it adds another 3 hours of work to reopen the case and re-evaluate the decision.
So we set out an ambition that if we could lower the 54% of reapplying to only be 25% we would save a great deal.
Hypothesis
If we could explain earlier and better for the clients which documents they need to provide and allow them to hand them in earlier. Then the social secretary will be able to give feedback more times to make sure we get the right documents.
This should reduce the number of rejected applications based on insufficient documents, and save us a lot of time and effort.
As so often with our work in the city we are not doing anything new under the stars but rather doing what should have been done a long time ago.
We went about putting together an online form with the opportunity for the citizen to also attach documents. It made it possible to provide examples, images, and links to the correct sort of attachments. As well as allowing for the citizen to start providing the right documents from time 0 of the application process.
The challenge of the form was however the share number of branching options it needed to take and which questions we could use to make these decisions. But basically, we wanted to achieve a form where you did not need to answer questions that are not relevant to your situation. This happened in the paper form since the pure nature of paper and it of course left the citizen frustrated and confused over not knowing how to answer questions that is not relevant to them. If I am a pensioner applying I don't want questions about what kind of jobs have been applying to :)
The practical work
We outlined all questions we had seen from the investigation report and from the form being sent out trying to abstract what data we actually were asking for and categorizing it. We also made a database of all the 72 different attachments and added examples of these documents as well as links to where one could find them. If you could get them online etc. (we thought it was unnecessary to ask for an attachment in an online form if you could not access it digitally).
This work made it easier to then move on and construct the branching of questions in the online form and also serves as a good structure for understanding the process and the future maintenance of the service.
We then tested the form in a controlled situation with social secretaries as well as citizens who just recently had applied for economical aid to find out if it made sense if our questions were understood if we got hold of all information as well as found bugs.
We have now initially tried this new digital form on 4 first-time applicants with great success. Both citizens and social secretaries find it easier and more convenient to get going at once. The initial call between citizen and social secretary that happens after the form has been filed becomes more supportive due to the information the social secretary now sits on. The citizen also experiences a calmer setting at home when they start this journey of applying for economical aid instead of the smaller chock of the investigative questions happening before.
Our plan is now to roll out to a larger set of citizens to see if it supports the hypothesis we set up. But before we end just a fun fact the time of the replies we got on the test form was the following.
Client 1–08:23
Client 2–19:34
Client 3–14:47
Client 4–01:24
All outside our normal call hours :)
