Co-creation in respect of the citizen’s home

The Public Home Care in Aarhus wanted to work with the this challenge. They wanted to avoid institutionalizing the private home. But at the same time they wanted to maintain the high level of professionalism.

To create awareness about this complex situation you need to see the situation from different perspectives.

We used design methods to get to know the stakeholders and their needs and preferences. We conducted a field study in Public Home Care, where we followed the caretakers and made interviews with the citizens, they visited. We identified a number of dilemmas that we could use as a starting point for an idea generation of new ways of working.

Examples of dilemmas:

1: It is often seen that the care-taker is the most important link to the rest of the world. The care-taker gets to know the citizen’s good – and bad – relations to others.

Which role should the care-taker have in the citizen’s life? How close can they be? And how do the care-takers support good relations and protect against “bad company”?

2: When you are familiar with the habits of the citizen, the daily work is peaceful and both parts are satisfied. But often habits and the way of doing things can not written down. That makes it difficult for a new care-taker to do things “the right way”. How do we share that tacit knowledge?

A large number of teams were invited to co-creation workshops, where they selected the dilemmas that were relevant to work with in their particular team. The purpose was to  improve the citizens’ experience of home-care. And make routines and ways of working that were effective and professionally meaningful for the staff

The care-takes got some design-help to rework loose ideas into concrete new ways of working. These test actions were visualized to make them easy to share and remember in the respective teams. They were presented “at home” in the bigger teams, evaluated by colleagues and made ready for implementation.