Enabling Social Prescribing

Project Deliverables

User Research

Technical Research

Project Management

Resources

Tooling Logins

Coda doc filters

Copy of Numbers and measures

Explore

Research Findings Report

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

User Research⁠

and

Technical Research⁠

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

Pennine Lancashire⁠

, 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

1.1 Stakeholders interview numbers

Stakeholder role

Activity providers

Frontline workers

Managers

OpenActive application providers

Other stakeholders

Organisation

Digilynx

Coventry Council

Hyndburn Leisure

Blackburn Council

BPRCVS

Blackburn with Darwen Carers

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

HLSC

Blackburn Council

NHS England London Region

Pendle Leisure Trust

Schools Plus

Team Kinetic

Sported

Playwaze

TSG - Legend

PlayFinder

IMIN

Groop

NEL

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

2.2 Personas summary 2

Persona

Avatar

Name

Role

Description

Page

Activity providers

Charlotte

Activity/Class facilitator

Charlotte is passionate about older people’s wellbeing and believes that appropriate exercise can have lots of benefits – falls prevention, mental health, loneliness prevention etc

⁠

Activity Provider - Persona

⁠

Frontline workers

Lorraine

Social Prescriber

Lorraine works for a GP practice and aims to prevent people needing to see a GP when they may benefit more from social/physical activities than medicine/drugs. Lorraine will work with frequent GP practice visitors, rehabilitations, GP referrals (medicine can’t help) or when a patient is happy to have a chat to see if they may benefit from local social/physical activities.

⁠

Frontline worker - Persona

⁠

Service users

David

Retired

David is a widower that is heading towards 80. He has always been fit but has not got out of the house as much lately and notices that things are a bit more of a struggle these days. His family are not too far away and do visit reasonably regularly but his friend died last year and he doesn’t have his dog anymore.

⁠

Service User - Older Person - Persona

⁠

Service users

Tony

Unemployed

Tony is unemployed and has not worked since a mental health issue approx. 20 years ago. He is separated from his wife with whom he has two kids each of whom have given him a grandchild. DWP have allowed him not to search for jobs but every two years they stress him out with another interview to see if he could work again. He lives on his own paying rent (benefits) in the house he’s been in for over 30 years. He grow Bonsai trees.

⁠

Service User - Mental Health - Persona

⁠

Managers

Gareth

‎Health Partnerships & Commercial Manager

Gareth has a strategic responsibility for public health. He is keen to prevent people needing GP or A&E. He’d like to engage a significant number of people to become more active. He thinks social prescribing could help with this but recognises that there are a number of barriers to overcome.

⁠

Managers - Persona

⁠

Application Provider

Greg

Product Manager

Greg is a product manager for SPActive He is trying to provide a product to help frontline workers identify the best local services/activities that will help support their client list. They want to focus on their UI and features to enable the frontline workers to be more productive and help more people. They want a feed/API to access local service information that is rich and correct.

⁠

Application Provider - Persona

⁠

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.

User Journeys⁠

Frontline worker user journey overview

Frontline worker user journey overview

1.Referral

2.Consider options

3.Shared decision

4.Attend

5.Participate

Frontline workers

Don’t see referral into exercise as their role

Difficult to know what activity sessions are availableNeed to understand exactly what the activity/service is offering to ensure client can copeClient isn’t interested in doing physical activity, too many other problems

Not enough local activity sessions can be found

Don’t trust information that exists Client lacks confidence, has anxiety, embarrassed so needs hand-holding to attend

Need to know if the providers can cope with needs of the cohortsNeed to know if activity appropriate to client needs Frontline workers lack confidence and skill set to motivate client to be active

⁠

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.

⁠

Interactive Questionnaire⁠

⁠

Example barriers feedback table.

⁠

⁠

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.

⁠

⁠

7.1 Potential Cross-sector Taxonomy Solution 2

7.1 Potential Cross-sector Taxonomy Solution 2

Cross-sector Taxonomy Method

4 central taxonomies, agreed by all sectors, that make sense to activity (and service) providers.

Activity (and services) should be mapped to the central taxonomies by activity (and service) providers

Sector led taxonomies e.g. Snomed can map their terms to the central taxonomies

This allows a user to use a sector taxonomy to identify appropriate activity (or services)

Alternatively a user can filter on the central taxonomies to identify appropriate activity (or services)

Any change, therefore, to a sector taxonomy doesn’t impact on any other sector

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

8.1 Organisations by Stakeholder 2

Activity providers

Frontline workers

Managers

OpenActive application providers

Other stakeholders

Social prescribing application provider

Kevin Flinton

Digilynx

Hayley Noel

Coventry Council

Lisa Charnley

Hyndburn Leisure

Linda Horsfields

Hyndburn Leisure

Michelle Rutherford

Blackburn Council

Tracy True

Blackburn Council

Alison Jones

BPRCVS

Isma Sajid

Blackburn with Darwen Carers

Shaun Dodds

BPRCVS

Amy Whitham

BPRCVS

Robbie Fraser

NHS

Tony Armstrong

BPRCVS

Dr Simon Tobin

Social Prescribing Lead GP for North Southport PCN

Deborah Dewhurst

BPRCVS

Helen Price

Enfield Voluntary Action

Jessica Bunn

Enfield Voluntary Action

Tracey Lines

Active Partnerships

Oliver Sisman

London Sport

Richard Brown

BwD Refresh, BwD Council

Tina Pilkington

Sport England

Mark Stephenson

Active Lancashire

Leon Crosby

Blackburn Youth Zone

Ken Masser

Rossendale Leisure Trust

Ben Fatimilehin

Active Lancashire

Paul Blythin

Active Lancashire

Linda Vernon

HLSC

Sarah Quinn

Blackburn Council

Joe Fraser

NHS England London Region

Chris Rigby

Pendle Leisure Trust

Andy Halliwell

Schools Plus

Chris Martin

Team Kinetic

Helen Clayton

Sported

Charlie Clark

Playwaze

James Barter

TSG - Legend

Jamie Foale

PlayFinder

Nish Desai

IMIN

Barrie Taylor

Groop

Devika Vadher

NEL

James Watson

NHS

Martin Cattermole

NHS

Jade Cation

Emduk

Denys Rayner

Swahsn

Chris Norfield

London Sport

Alice John

4 Global

Leeann Monk-Ozgul

Elemental

Mo Rahman

Social RX

⁠

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

Ecosystem⁠

page.

⁠

⁠

9 Coda

Coda has been used as a convenient way to collect and share findings from ongoing research into the barriers of using

OpenActive⁠

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

website⁠

but if you register for a free Coda user and login then you will be able to add comments.

See

here⁠

for how to set up a Coda account to access the full

Enabling Social Prescribing⁠

site

Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.

Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (

CtrlP

) instead.