18 October 2017
Over the last couple of months, CenSE has run a 4-day course for health and social care managers engaged in the new integrated services for vulnerable adults. The course was intended specifically to focus on the ‘soft’ issue of how you develop a shared culture as well as the key tasks of designing integrated services. The course combined visiting speakers, structured inputs from the course tutors, work on qualitative evaluation of service delivery, group work, and sessions on self-care in periods of change.
The first session focused on understanding health and social care as ‘services’ and what this implies for how they are designed and delivered. It explored how these services can add value to their users and the processes through which this happens.
Session two looked at developing user-centred cultures within health and social care services and the challenges that this poses.
Session three focused on designing and co-designing integrated services together with service users, utilising the ‘service blue-printing’ soft technology.
The final session looked at the importance of the service user experience and emotional engagement with health and social care services. It concluded with an extended exercise to help participants to work through through these issues in the context of service integration in Scotland.
The course was enthusiastically received by its participants, who all determined to take back the issues and approaches discussed to their own teams and agencies.