Innovation Skåne project

Supporting relatives in their emotional journey of being separated from their loved ones.

Info

This project was given to me and my team by Innovation Skåne. Below, you will find the challenges we faced and how we solved them. At the end of the page, there's a separate approach and a new concept that I conducted after the project was finished.

Client:

Innovation Skåne

Role:

UX/Service Designer

The Challenge

The emotional experience of placing a relative at a retirement home can be very difficult as relatives leave their care role to the care staff. The relatives feel that they have become experts in caring for their loved ones and now must learn to trust that role to the staff of the retirement home.

Our Approach

We began with field research, where we conducted interviews with the staff. The results of our visits were very positive as we were able to observe the environment and get first-hand information from the staff and their perspectives on how the facilities operate. We interviewed the operations manager, the head nurse, and a social worker, employed by the municipality with the role of giving support to relatives. This interview helped us get an overview of the relative's needs. We also conducted two workshops with caregivers at the retirement home.

Based on our findings, we made a stakeholder map of the current retirement home in Perstorp. We sought to cover specific pain points and interactions with care staff and social workers which made the relatives feel at ease or worried. To get an overview of this we made a user journey map of the process of moving to a retirement home and the feelings involved for the relatives.
 
 

Design opportunities

- Establishing trust
- Feeling involved 

Relatives tend to feel guilty and contact nursing staff as a way of expressing concern →
Improve the everyday communication between relatives and residents through some mechanism that enables them to share moments from their lives.

Relatives don’t trust the staff as much as they trust themselves →
Improve communication between staff and relatives for getting better impressions of their care.

Relatives need more information about the process of moving in → Provide relevant information within existing or new touchpoints.
 
 

My Role

As an interaction designer, both I and the team were presented with numerous challenges taking on the role of service designers through this design case. As the process expanded, our design case became progressively more complex as touchpoints were often ’touched’ by more than just the residents, there was an underlying need for addressing all stakeholders during the ideation phase to comprehend the impact of all touchpoints within our user journey.

I was in charge of communicating with the retirement home, planning and coordinating workshops and interviews. My role in the team and competence was most noticeably in the collection of data, interviewing care-staff, the head nurse, residents, and relatives, and pinpointing the most relevant and important details from these interviews that helped us understand the underlying needs of all stakeholders.
 

Service blueprint

Stakeholder map

User Persona

Secondary research

Semi-structured interviews

User Journey map

Outcome

After analyzing the services provided in Perstorp’s retirement homes, we have identified the pain points and issues and as a result of our research, we have put forward a few suggestions/proposals for how to create more trust and improve the relationship between relatives and staff.

The solutions are simple, easy to implement, and do not require much time or extra tasks from the staff. More importantly, they address some of the issues encountered by relatives when interacting with the services of the retirement homes in Perstorp. The first proposal is the redesigned welcome letter and the second proposal is something we call 5-min talk.
 

Redesigned Welcome Letter

The welcome letter is a physical letter the new resident and relatives will receive when it is time to move in. The letter contains information about practical errands and a brief introduction to the staff members that will take care of the new resident. We chose to put practical information in the letter since there’s a great need for more information when the approval for moving in has been determined. Many times this is plain information that can be put on the website but might be hard to find. Including this information will greatly help the information flow between the new resident and retirement home and in so help reduce the workload and responsibility the social worker has. The pictures and introductions of the staff members is a way for the new resident and their relatives to get to know the staff and feel more comfortable during the transition process. The staff’s contact information will also be provided for easier access to them directly.
 
 

5 - min Talk

As much as phone calls and other long-distance means of communication might help relatives to stay in touch with their elderly relatives and their caregivers, nothing can replace in-person communication. This is especially the case when it comes to building a trusting relationship with a new person. When visited by relatives, some of the caregivers reported going out of their way to try to have a small informal chat with the relatives. They described these moments as decisive for building and maintaining a good relationship with the residents’ families. Both staff and relatives mentioned the importance of face-to-face interaction as the best way to get to know one another.

Despite the benefits of these short interactions between relatives and staff, they only occur on the caregivers own initiative. For this reason, we suggest integrating this short conversation into the visitation process so that it does not depend on the initiative of any individual caregiver and becomes a fixed part of the services offered to the relatives.

This addition would not require any additional knowledge, takes only a few minutes and has the potential to increase the relatives’ engagement in the care process as well as strengthen their relationship with the caregivers.

A Different Angle

As a team, we turned our attention to building a closer relationship between care staff and relatives. We thought that establishing trust both early and continuously would help the relatives feeling less worried. The suggested solutions are a good starting point and can lead to a better overall emotional experience for the relatives. However, these solutions are reformulated versions of what the municipality is already trying to achieve, the caretakers are often overwhelmed and find less quality time to spend with the residents of the retirement home, something they call Guldstunder. This means that even if our solutions are improved versions of their system the care staff are still short on time as it stands right now. The welcome letter is still something that can help with the first impression of the retirement home but the 5-min talk improvements might not be possible to implement as it is already something the care staff is not able to execute as often as they would like.

A New Concept

I have developed an alternative approach and concept to help solve these issues. My approach focuses on the residents and the relative's relationship directly rather than going through the care staff. My new approach takes into account our previous pain points but also provides a solution to their staff problem long term.

The concept is an app that has taken inspiration from reflective journals. The idea is that the resident will use this app as a self-care routine and express their activities and emotions in the app. The recipient of these posts/documents are relatives. The relatives are not able to communicate back within the app, which was a conscious choice as it could lead to relatives being too comfortable with messaging rather than calling or visiting. Another problem could be that it would lead to making the app perhaps too complicated for the residents and possibly adding more work to the care staff as they would have to continuously help them.

What the app brings to the table

- The staffs' tight schedule won't be affected → The app is simple to use. Meaning the staff only needs to be there for the initial setup and then the resident can handle the rest.

- Establishes trust → the app focuses on establishing trust between the retirement home and the relatives by sharing moments and feelings of the residents' day directly to the relative.
The app will give the relatives impressions of how the resident is feeling each day, this will, in turn, give the relatives an impression of the staff's care.

- Feeling involved → Relatives will be informed of the residents' everyday life and are then free to call or visit them to talk about events and experiences.

- Establishes a self-care routine → Residents will become more aware of how they are feeling. It will give them a simple yet effective way to track their mood and focus on their meaning.

Team:

Florian Dymke

Stephanie Neumann

Johan Hellgren

Pedro Marinho

Year:

2019

Thanks for taking the time to visit this portfolio!

If you would like to get in touch, here's my email: Alexandergrovnes@gmail.com or use the links below