Connecting neighbourhoods through care
My role
In early 2019, the Ford Fund ran a competition over four months; asking for ideas that would empower future urban communities and promote connected, sustainable and healthy living. Working in a team alongside three doctoral researchers and two undergraduates, my role included planning, conducting and analysing research, brainstorming ideas and developing the service journeys.
Skills
- 🔬 Qualitative and quantitative research design
- 🕵️♂️ Data analysis and insight synthesis
- 💡 Service design
The challenge
Our team decided to examine the relationship between care and mobility, with a focus on the elderly population. We were concerned about the falling relative capacity for care provision in the UK thanks to depressed real-terms wages and public service cuts. We also knew that this issue would be exacerbated in the future without significant changes thanks to the population getting older.
User research
We conducted interviews with care-givers and care-receivers using an informal, semi-structured approach. This allowed us to talk to people in their own time and own environments, letting us reach a wider range of contacts.
We then extracted insights from the interviews using an affinity map. This allowed us to examine the common findings between individual interviews.
Key findings
- 🤝 Elderly people with the best support have strong connections within their local community. Without this, people rely on their family for support but this can be jeopardised by family disputes.
- 🏃♂️ Family members living further from their relatives find it more difficult to provide support for daily activities. This is because the journeys each way add to the time and financial cost of providing care for the relative.
- 🙋♀️ People who were once independent feel guilty about asking family and friends for help. They feel differently however about volunteers or professionals whose role it is to support them.
- 🚗 People living in areas with poor public transport are left isolated once they can no longer drive. This excludes them from participating in social and commercial activities and reduces their independence.
The idea
A digital service that helps to introduce a local support network for elderly people living in the community.
The platform supports family carers by providing access to a network of verified volunteers that can assist their loved ones, at times when they are unable to do so. The family carer can set a task for the volunteer, who in return receives rewards from partnering brands. Tasks could include accompanying an older citizen with their shopping or stopping by for a social visit.
The rationale
Our goal is to create sustainable and supportive relationships between elderly and time-rich people in the local community. This will enable elderly citizens to continue to participate in social and commercial activities without feeling they are putting strain on their families.
The family carer establishes the contact between the service and an elderly relative. They benefit from the platform as it reduces their caring load whilst ensuring their relative’s needs are being seen to. There is also the potential to explore a low-cost subscription model for the carer in the future.
For the volunteering role we will target students and younger pensioners. These groups are price-sensitive and uptake can be incentivised through rewarding them for tasks with vouchers that can be spent at partnering brands. The social mission and strong community networks of the volunteers will be used to attract brands from other exclusive rewards platforms.
🏆 The outcome
Our idea won, receiving £12,500 from the Ford Fund and Loughborough University to go towards the pilot phase.
The next phase is underway and includes setting up a limited company, building an initial prototype and conducting primary research with our key users to help develop and test the service model. We have since won additional grant funding from Santander Universities.
If you are interested in any of my work, feel free to get in touch with me at peter77waters@gmail.com or connect on LinkedIn.
Other team members for this project were: Rhys Comissiong, Robin Harmer, Nicholas Johnson, William Jephcote and Rachel Chung
