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Research Steps

Research Summary

This final section outlines the steps taken in carrying out the user research. It is not necessarily in a sequential order as the research activity gave various insight relevant to each of the steps at various points throughout the project. Only a very short summary of each step is given but the details can be found under and in the Coda doc. Coda provides the reader with ‘hover over’ reference links and dynamic tables & graphs.

1 Stakeholders

The end to end process of a social prescriber referring physical activity was mapped out and the stakeholders identified as below:
@Managers
: responsible for strategic decisions on public health, budget setting & commissioning
@Frontline workers
: responsible for ‘prescribing’ activities to meet personal need
@Activity providers
:responsible for providing activities to meet personal needs
@Service users
: responsible for deciding which activities to participate in
@Application Provider
: responsible for developing ‘tooling’ to support the above ecosystem roles

Working with , we sought to interview at least 6 people within each stakeholder group as to what they believed were the barriers to social prescribing referring people into physical activity.
1.1 Stakeholders interview numbers
Stakeholder role
4
12
13
8
6
Organisation
Organisation
Organisation
Organisation
Organisation
Digilynx
Coventry Council
Hyndburn Leisure
Hyndburn Leisure
Blackburn Council
Blackburn Council
BPRCVS
Blackburn with Darwen Carers
BPRCVS
BPRCVS
NHS
BPRCVS
Social Prescribing Lead GP for North Southport PCN
BPRCVS
Enfield Voluntary Action
Active Partnerships
London Sport
BwD Refresh, BwD Council
Sport England
Active Lancashire
Blackburn Youth Zone
Rossendale Leisure Trust
Active Lancashire
Active Lancashire
HLSC
Blackburn Council
Schools Plus
Team Kinetic
Sported
Playwaze
TSG - Legend
PlayFinder
IMIN
Groop
NEL
NHS
NHS
Emduk
Swahsn
London Sport

2 Personas

From the interviews we developed generic personas to help form an understanding of the stakeholder context and issues. These personas are set out below.

2.1 User Research in Numbers

User research participants interviewed
48
Activity providers interviewed 6
Application providers interviewed 11
Frontline workers interviewed 9
Managers interviewed 12
Service Users interviewed 5
Wider Research conducted 4
2.2 Personas summary 2
There are no rows in this table

2.3 User Journeys

The personas and interviews were developed into user journeys to highlight the barriers. Below is just the frontline worker rows and the full table is available under User Research.
Frontline worker user journey overview
1
1
1
1
1

3 Brainstorming & gap analysis

The barriers identified from the personas were consolidated into 14 key barriers. These were considered by the project team to brainstorm what might be possible to mitigate these. The team also carried out an initial tooling and standards review bearing the barriers in mind.
Research workshop - Barrier to strategies (1).jpg

4 Workshops

Three online workshops used Miro in different ways to identify and prioritise ideas as to how to mitigate the barriers identified in the interviews. The diagram below is available inside the CODA doc to look at this in more detail, should that be of interest.
Barriers to social prescribing - FW - Picture - exec summary (1).jpg

5 Questionnaire

All the ideas/approaches were added into Coda tables and linked together to barriers through stakeholder groups and benefits.
The barriers and outline strategies have been created into a questionnaire, an example of this is in the table below. As part of the real commitment to working !in the open”, the questionnaire remains as a live link at the link below and can be completed up until the end of May.
Example barriers feedback table.
Screenshot 2021-03-19 at 11.25.44.png

6 Technical review of tooling and standards

The technical review was progressed in parallel to the user research. A workshop in the last week of the project gave the application providers a chance to feedback before the report was delivered to ODI. Feedback remains limited; the view of the researchers is that application providers will respond to the requests from commissioners / clients and are hence not too worried about what is requested. However some feedback has been provided by Elemental, Imin and DigiLynx.
The diagram below shows how OpenActive and OpenReferral could be transformed. The diagram is not intended to make a point here other than to show that a technical review of OpenActive has taken place.

7 Data Requirements & taxonomies

Taxonomies are critical, but this is not widely understood. The following provides this understanding
From the frontline worker perspective they want to be able to search for appropriate services, using language, conditions and segmentation and be able to report against terminology that means something to them. This set of language will be specific to each agency, like the police, the NHS, sport and leisure, local councils, housing etc. These frontline professionals cannot become experts in the different language of all sectors
From the provider perspective, they want to “tag” their services to these languages in a way that means they can be found when a search happens. Again, they don’t want to have to learn and then deliver 5, 6, 7 different mappings - one for each sector, where their service may have value into that sector
For self-care searches, they want to use language that is not jargon and that means something to them and hence probably want a separate set of language that they can use for searches
Finally, software providers need to know what their system should enable.
The conclusion is that a set of central cross-sector taxonomies are developed. This will allow sectors to map their taxonomies to this list, and then provide a single set of taxonomies for provides and self-care citizens to use. Without this work, which should be led cross-sector, one of the core principles of open data seems unlikely; namely a single repository that can be efficiently and accurately used cross-sector. The diagram below looks to offer this vision pictorially, demonstrating how existing taxonomy models such as needs and SNOMED can be mapped to recommended sets of central lists.
Taxonomy model-newV4-pastel.png
7.1 Potential Cross-sector Taxonomy Solution 2
There are no rows in this table

8 Ecosystem

The following table describes the stakeholders that were interviewed and made up the ecosystem. The user journey shows the barriers that were identified for each of the stakeholders.
8.1 Organisations by Stakeholder 2
4
12
13
8
6
3

8.2 Data-flow

The data-flow diagram was drafted using the
@ODI Mapping Tool
based on initial research of the end to end process. The key stakeholders were identified and added into the diagram. This was then reviewed for potential improvements as the project progressed. More details can be found on the page.
Ecosystem - To be (3).jpg

9 Coda

Coda has been used as a convenient way to collect and share findings from ongoing research into the barriers of using data within social prescribing initiatives. It will remain available as a resource until at least June 2021.
You can access this site as if it were a but if you register for a free Coda user and login then you will be able to add comments.
See
for how to set up a Coda account to access the full site
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