Reducing unmet needs through cross-sector collaboration in emergencies
Back in March 2020, the UK entered lockdown as a result of the Coronavirus pandemic.
At this time, I was redeployed into the Voluntary and Community Sector Emergencies Partnership (VCSEP) design team, along with Jo Straw, Mieka Webber, Sarah Bargiela, Alex Ballard and Thuong Nguyen. We all came from different parts of British Red Cross to form a multi-disciplinary team. Between us we had experience in international response, coordination, user research and service deign.
To find more about the Emergencies Partnership visit Robyn’s blog here
Identifying and responding to unmet need
Initially we were tasked with a discovery piece around the positioning of the Emergencies Partnership as part of the Coronavirus response. We asked the following questions as part of our discovery:
How can the Emergencies Partnership identify and respond to unmet needs in England?
How can the Emergencies Partnership coordinate information between local and national organisations for a more effective and efficient response?
What are the barriers to local organisations responding to unmet needs within their local area?
Answers to these questions are not a small order!
We had the working hypotheses that where need is known about locally, and there is the capacity and skill to meet this need, it is being met. But where unmet need occurs it is where:
Needs aren’t known about (unidentified need)
There isn’t enough capacity to meet the need at a local level
There’s no clear referral route for needs which require more specialist support
We talked with a number of organisations, from small local organisations, VCS organisations, mutual aid groups, local infrastructure bodies, to larger organisations, such as the British Red Cross, REACT, St John Ambulance, Victim Support. We also spoke with Local Resilience Forums (LRFs) and Local Authorities. In addition, we talked to people working on individual support platforms such as the Co-op. We did this to learn more about tools that connect and enable people in a community to ask or be referred for support to meet individual needs.
No clear path for local organisations
From our discussions we gained a lot of insight that helped inform what we did next. Here’s what we learnt.
- Multiple organisations have a partial understanding of unmet needs but there is no single version of the truth.
- Often information about need and information about activities to meet needs are kept separately which does not enable an accurate understanding of unmet need.
- There’s a lack of clear pathways where people have needs that can’t be met at a local level.
- There are a lot of options for individuals to request support, but this is not necessarily the case for organisations. Either they are unaware that these routes exist, or if support exists and the support can’t be provided for whatever reason, there is no clear pathway to escalate this unmet need.
- Local intelligence from local organisations, who have the best picture of unmet need in a local area which fill gaps in understanding are often not included as part of regional or national data on emergency preparedness and response.
- Lots of local groups are responding to needs effectively, but this is not — accounted for when looking at the total number of people supported when viewed at a national scale.
- Organisations categorise information differently making it harder to champion the voices of local actors, whether that be for emergency planning or response.
Click through to see some further insights from our discovery with Mutual Aid groups and high risk individuals
Local intelligence and action
After we had defined the problem space, we came up with a number of ideas to be tested with our users — local organisations, Local Infrastructure Organisations and national organisations.
These needed to:
- Be a method for organisations to request support from local, regional and national partners when they are struggling to meet needs locally.
- Be a method for local leads within areas throughout England to champion their local voice, raising concerns and challenges being experienced locally against a baseline. To enable planning, response and recovery accounting for local need at local to national scales and supports and influences advocacy informed by local need.
- Be a method to identify support requests, establish geographical relationships, and use information to identify opportunities, challenges and emerging trends to better coordinate the sector to respond to changing need.
We developed a number of prototype tools to roll out with the Emergencies Partnership
Firstly, a Request for Support Service was created, where local organisations, Local Authorities, or LRFs, can request support from the voluntary and community sector to escalate unmet needs. This can now be accessed at www.vcsep.org.uk.
We also started to roll out Local Intelligence Insight capturing information categorised by geographic Scope, sector and population groups. This could then be enhanced with information about time and severity. A quick pulse check, identifying change from a baseline — a form taking less than 1 minute to complete. We also started to roll out a longer insights form, providing local leads space to add greater detail on local intelligence — descriptions, population groups affected as well as space to prescribe potential solutions and add evidence. These insights would be actionable and enhance other datasets compiled by the Emergencies Partnership. As part of this, using international coordination experience, adapting to a UK context, we began to define sectors, and population groups to categorise information by to allow for easier analysis.
We developed alongside organisations a web map to identify secondary data sources and locations of support requests in order to enhance decision making at the local level — and allowing questions to be asked such as: Do we have local organisation coverage in certain areas, are locations which are requesting a certain type of support near locations which provide that support in the long term (e.g. food banks).
These initial tools are all part of our vision to create an accessible single place to go, which pulls together data across the sector in order to help us work together to reduce gaps in service, better understand the challenges people are facing and improve the coordination of our collective efforts as a sector to changing needs.
When creating these initial tools, we were not only thinking about the Coronavirus response, but also how this could apply to other emergencies that the Emergencies Partnership could respond to — and begin to ask questions, such as what are gaps in knowledge or data literacy required? Also if you want to know more, feel free to reach out to us at vcsep@redcross.org.uk!
Final thoughts
When writing this blog, I had time to reflect on what has been achieved in the past 6 months as well as how the Coronavirus response has influenced and set a first standard around how local and national organisations work together at times of emergency. From initial discussions with stakeholders about how to identify and respond to local unmet need, these have led to the creation of a toolbox of activities which complement each other to respond to needs of a wide range of audiences. Local organisations can request support if they can’t meet a need. Local actors can respond, build presence and contribute and champion their local voice at a regional and national level. And organisations part of the Emergencies Partnership can have a common operating picture of need in a shared place.
While the Emergencies Partnership has accelerated what it can provide during this response, what is clear is that this is only the beginning. Further refinement is needed, processes and workflows strengthened, and capacity and partnerships built to be able to use and interpret the wealth of knowledge that the Emergencies Partnership can provide.
Also, I’d like to say a massive thank you to Rich Davill , Nathalie Martin, Blessed Mbang (British Red Cross), Anne-Marie Frankland, Claire Byrne, Jonathan Gatward, Colin Spiller(MapAction), and all other people supporting the Emergencies Partnership and helping the development and roll out of the tools mentioned above!
