Adult social care: digital transformation

In this blog post, we share our top 5 learnings from the latest round of user research that will inform the next iteration of the ‘Track My Request’ service.

Everyone understands the role of a researcher on a project, or at least they think they do. But there is more to carrying out interviews and telling others what they’ve learned.

In this blog we will hear from the team at Neath Port Talbot Council involved in building and testing the product – a text messaging service set up to help residents track their application for support from Adult Social Services.

Over the last 9 months we’ve been working across our 3 local authorities on the Accessing Adult Social Care project with the team from CDPS. It’s been a new way of working and it’s been brilliant to work collaboratively and see how we can approach our service delivery in a different way.

In our previous blog post, we shared an update on the development journey for our ‘Track My Request’ solution to give easy access to status updates on requests to Adult Social Care.

Over the past few months, we’ve been sharing our progress working together with Neath Port Talbot, Blaenau Gwent and Torfaen to explore a shared challenge around the front door of Adult Social Care.

Open communication has been a key principle for us from day one. To really deliver better public services, organisations need to communicate effectively both internally and externally.

Following the findings of our discovery phase we’ve now moved into the alpha phase of our Adult Social Care Digital Transformation Project and created a prototype status update text and website.

In this post, developer Matthew Pugh tells us a bit about the approach to testing and iterating through prototyping.

Back in August, we set out to identify a shared challenge impacting the front door of Adult Social Care across Blaenau Gwent, Torfaen and Neath Port Talbot, exploring how we could use user-centred design and digital enablers to support services. 

One of our priorities at the Centre is to help organisations and their leaders develop greater understanding and confidence around digital.

In this post, the three project sponsors tell us a bit about why they got involved, what it’s been like it, what they’re learning and what they’re hoping to achieve.

Chris Owens, manager at the Adult Single Point of Contact team at Neath Port Talbot Council is part of the expert squad project working in partnership with Social Finance. In this latest blog post Chris gives his experience of working with the project so far.

How do you balance user needs with organisational needs, strategy and constraints? How do you collaborate successfully across local authorities? How do you start to embed digital transformation?

We’re the three project managers from @NPTCouncil, @BlaenauGwentCBC and @torfaencouncil working with the first Centre for Digital Public Services digital transformation squad.

The first project to kick off has been our squad looking at digital transformation. One of the challenges for the public sector in Wales is finding the expertise and skills in designing services with users needs at the heart.