Aditi Joshi

For this project, we were asked to respond to a brief for the NHS 24 platform. The NHS 24 is Scotland’s national telehealth service that makes up one of the seven special health strands under the NHS umbrella. It is primarily an out-of-hours service to dispense advice and information when general practices are closed. The NHS 24 includes several helplines, both general and specific as well as a set of online resources.

Our particular focus for this project as citizen designers was to think about the underlying social aspects that relate to how we interact and relate to healthcare services. We found it important to think about the social aspects of this project, making sure that they influenced how we went about any new partnerships. Healthcare is inherently social and in order to expand the current healthcare services, it would be important to understand the social aspects that influence the system in order to use partnerships in a socially minded way.

While we were doing desk research about important health movements and strains currently on the NHS, we found that right now there are several organisations that are working on community food and health both in Scotland and around the world. There seems to be a large impetus currently around changes in food policy to make access to healthy food easier and this would be a perfect time for an organisation like NHS Inform to become involved in these efforts to provide a healthcare perspective and the backing of a large governmental institution.

ENGAGEMENTS

understanding current work

We thought it important to engage with current community health professionals as well as users of NHS 24 to understand how healthy food choices could be embedded within the existing framework. As such, we have conducted interviews and workshops that allowed us to understand how to connect people and concepts. We found the following insights: (1) Health and food inequalities and environmental situations highly affect the way in which people are able to access food choices; (2) It is difficult to get people to access their data, but this would help the NHS; (3) There are currently a lot of organizations working on community food but they aren’t connected to one another; (4) It becomes much easier to deliver services when they are socially based; and (5) NHS 24 was not currently a presence in people’s everyday lives. We used these five insights to help guide a framework of several ways NHS 24 could embed healthy food choices into their exisiting offering.

FRAMEWORK DESIGN

embedding food into existing offerings

In order to integrate healthy food information into people’s everyday lives, we thought about times in one’s life when they change their food habits. We found that during these moments, there is certain information or resources that one needs but often there isn’t a verified source to distribute these resources and because of that, it is difficult to know what the best practices are for that particular change. We believe NHS Inform has a role to position themselves as a reliable source for healthy food information during these life changes around food. Additionally, because of the unique situation that Scotland currently is in regarding their changing food policies, we find right now to be an important time for NHS 24 to tap into existing schemes to provide a broad democratic vision around healthy food choices, showing to the public that the health care sector sees food as a priority. As such, we came a framework that embeds healthy food choices into people’s everyday lives.

You can view our final newsprint report below: