Supporting University College London to co-design a future service to make the transition between children and adult healthcare services better for patients and their families

 

Illustrations from PEEK branding

Project aims:

The PEEK team had already conducted some background research and some workshops to help create the general idea around PEEK but they were looking for some support to further co-design with children and young people how the service could work and what the most useful features could be.

The approach

We worked closely with the PEEK team to build upon their existing learnings, we carried out some desk research of their previous insights and work. We then started to create a list of what the hypothesis user needs might be for this service and ran a workshop with the PEEK team to design early prototypes of the potential service to use as prompts in the co-design sessions. 

 

Running the co-design workshop

The PEEK team recruited a range of children and young people for the workshop through existing contacts with Great Ormond Street Hospital, Bright Futures UK and direct reach outs to children and young people who are heavily involved in campaigns for services and the transition from children's to adult health care to be improved. 

We originally planned to run an in person workshop but left it up to the children and young people to let us know what they would prefer and they chose for it to be online. 

We ran a two hour online co-design workshop on a Saturday morning. We started with an icebreaker and hearing about what people's journeys had been like and then moved into thinking about what the key things they would most like the service to do and why. We then took them through some very early prototypes to help further understand what might be most useful for them in the future. 

We made sure these prototypes were very low fidelity so that people would feel more confident ripping them apart and be able to be brutally honest. 

 

Outcomes and impact

From the workshop we learnt that the key features should be focused around some of these areas:

  1. Learning from other people journeys and what to expect: Videos of people talking about their journey and blog posts

  2. Helping you feel confident about moving to adult healthcare services: A series of questions that help you to understand what you feel confident with and where you might need some support

  3. How to communicate with your new health care team, tips on how to advocate for yourself

 

Next steps

We then designed up some high fidelity mockups based on the visual branding PEEK had started to create with some further adaptations.

The PEEK team is now applying for further funding and building a pilot version of this service ready to test.

 

“Charley was a delight to work with. Throughout the process, she consistently demonstrated a clear sense of direction, drawing on her previous experience with similar clients to define the project goals and the design pathway. Her approach was purposeful and informed, ensuring that each step aligned with our needs and vision.”

- Mollie Bartholomew, Project Co-ordinator, They/her

Thank you

A big thanks to the amazing PEEK team and all of the wonderful participants who have been involved with this project.

Client: University College London

Services: Service Design, User Research, Design Research

Team: Charley Pothecary and the PEEK team