#Thrive: Co-designing an emotional health and wellbeing service for children and young people
Service Design | Co-design | Prototyping
With Innovation Unit, Rochdale CCG, Rochdale Borough Council
Role Service Designer - facilitation, content and visual design, training and coaching
2017
Children and young people don’t want services that are only functional. They want to feel safe, have fun, and make new friends. What if we design services around their aspirations? What if various service providers worked closely together towards shared outcomes?
Bringing together commissioners, providers, children and young people, we aimed to design an early help mental health service providing emotional support in Rochdale for and with children and young people.
Journey
Innovation Unit, Rochdale CCG, and Rochdale Borough Council developed a collaborative commissioning model based on co-design principles. I joined the project when the team was beginning to co-design the service model with children and young people and their parents, service providers and commissioners.
Co-designing every aspect of the new service model:
Creating design principles and values
Designing the user experiences of the service and blueprints
Creating a hub space
Developing a communication strategy
Designing branding and look and feel of the service
Developing a culture of co-design and co-production:
We facilitated several workshops with commissioners and the staff to help them learn about co-design and prototyping. We also helped them reflect on how the journey of co-delivery had been and developed a strategy about how the team could continue to work in a co-design way.
After the service launch, we wanted to support the team to continue testing, reflecting, learning and iteratively improving the service. We designed an experimental ‘Co-design wall’ containing different co-design tools and templates to encourage the staff. We made it flexible enough so that people could use it how they wanted.
A film we made with children and young people during the co-design process
Outcome & Impact
#Thrive won the Redesign of Care in Mental Health Award in the Healthcare Transformation Awards 2017.
There is a team of 11 people who run the #Thrive service. They are a mixture of administrative staff, social workers, nurses, counsellors and qualified mental health support workers from voluntary sector partners.
The service offers open-door access for children and young people who feel they could benefit from some support to help with their emotional well-being. This means not having to wait for months to access support. The team has impacted the unmet needs of children and young people who would never have previously accessed services.
“It’s a massive change working here. I worked for 15 years at HYM. We used to talk about these things, but it was so clinical. This place is right in the community, people can walk in whenever they want; that changes everything. We really inhabit the values we were always talking about.”
Visiting the hub
after a year
‘Around the Corner’ was named by young people during the co-design process. The space should feel like a cafe just around the corner, not a mental health service place.
We revisited the space to carry out a light-touch evaluation after a year. I was happy to see the co-design wall was still there! The staff were still putting the voices of young people at the heart of the service delivery and reflecting on how best to enhance the co-design culture even when under pressure and new staff joined.