People First. A better way to manage care support.

In a new scheme being piloted by the HSE, people with disabilities are being given the option to manage their own support and care. This gives more choice and control to the individual and their family.

inCharge HQ, who have lived experience of this situation, came to us with the goal of improving the delivery of self directed care. The intention was to support families of people with disabilities to manage their care efficiently, helping to alleviate the stress involved and keep the person receiving care at the forefront.

We offered our time and expertise to explore solutions that would help to promote their vision for this essential work.

There were two aspects to this project; the first was exploring the existing systems and the process of receiving a personal budget for care. For this our focus lay in understanding the experiences of families as they went about organising care.

Our second focus was to look at how a daily management app might be structured. It was vital to create a flow that captured all of the elements involved in managing care, not only from an employer’s perspective but also the staff view, parent view and, most importantly, the person receiving care.

We first set about understanding the landscape of self-directed support schemes and how people with disabilities and their families managed their own care. By conducting user interviews and creating customer journey maps, we came to understand some of the difficulties and issues that may arise in self-directed care, including the ongoing management of a personal budget.

We created a storyboard to better visualise the process that families go through in organising care. This, along with a service blueprint, gave us a higher perspective of the overall system. Conducting this research allowed us to begin creating a UX vision for the app so that it could sit within a framework of self directed care.

The second part of our process focused on the development of a rapid UX Vision to help inChargeHQ begin to have conversations on how their app might evolve. After exploring the market and capturing the concepts generated by inChargeHQ, we created screens and prototypes to act as a visual exploration of those ideas.

We facilitated a user workshop to validate and discuss some of the ideas proposed for this care management app. During this exercise we asked how families currently managed several aspects of day to day care and found there were many issues that made care unnecessarily complex. The resulting feedback was that a digital solution like this app would solve many of these real issues.