Outcomes
The main achievements of the project are twofold:
The feedback from the elderly people in the target group indicates that they believe they will benefit from a service that allows them to stay socially active and connected, even though they are becoming less mobile.
For the organisations in the client consortium, the biggest change is that these new services no longer feature them as organisations that 'solve people's problems'. This was also one of the main outcomes of the needs assessment with elderly people and their supporters. The elderly people were very clear they wanted to remain in the driving seat when decisions were made about their lives – e.g. in deciding when they would engage in participation activities, and even when they needed more support or care services in the future. The lawn mower story above is a nice example of such thinking. Like WSG, all the commissioning organisations are now positioning themselves as organisations that help people to solve their own problems, while they still can. This is a new, and more appropriate, way of addressing people who do not consider themselves as ‘needing care’ yet. Indeed, these citizens are generally averse to any services which suggest that they can’t look after themselves - and this is currently the main barrier for the uptake of remote care services.
Another major achievement for the client consortium has been the learning process about user-driven innovation and co-creation. This way of working was fairly new to them. They were eager to learn more about it, as they genuinely wanted their organisations to be more customer-oriented, but they had little experience with the appropriate methods. STBY and Waag Society, as experts in this field, have taken care to involve the client team in every step of the process. Full documentation of the process is currently being produced in a booklet for internal use. The organisations aim to do more of this kind of co-creation project in the future.
