Stockport Council's new adult social care website 'My Care, My Choice': A business case for service co-design

Following research into our current methods of communication, Stockport Council’s Adult Social Care Department knew that the information provided on their current website did not help support informed decision making. The transformation of social care in England requires all Local Authorities to provide information to the general public on the range of options available, and also to ensure that people who fund their own care have access to good quality advice.

The result of much research and work with service users, carers, partners and staff is My Care, My Choice, a website which guides people through the ‘social care maze’ and has also made significant savings. Read this business case to see the enormous potential of service co-design.

Stockport Council's work to co-design their website has been included in the "Making Health and Social Care Personal and Local: Moving from Mass Production to Co-Production" publication. 

Below is a video interview with Jude Wells about the co-design of the website, recorded at the Stockport launch for the book.

The objectives were to end up with a website that delivered:

• A clear and easy-to-use pathway for all to understand what social care services are available locally.
• A platform for Stockport Council to deliver personalisation – so that our service users can make informed choices about their care

We partnered with CSED (Care Services Efficiencies Delivery) and Quickheart, a specialist website design company, to rebuild our site, working together with service users. This involved using ethnographic methodology to understand how our customers wanted to see information, what language was important to them, their perception of social care as a ‘place of last resort’ and the importance of clear and easy navigation tools on the site.

The first step was that the ethnographer independently recruited a range of our customers from across Stockport. The important element was that they were not people nominated by social care. The methodology the ethnographer uses means that, instead of the traditional workshop method, he worked with people in an intensive way. This meant a small number of users (30) to understand their views of social care and how they want to receive information – particularly, what things are important to them in relation to social care support.

The ethnographer carried out research with our customers in their own environment in order to establish what they thought of the way we currently provided online information.

Headlines from this research were:

• We needed to improve information and advice to the public about adult social care services, as our previous website was deemed not fit for purpose and was confusing and hard to navigate.
• Due to demographic pressures and the need to support increasing numbers of people, we needed to provide better information to support service users and their families to enable better informed decision making.
• We had to reach people before they got into crisis and to promote prevention options and choices for them in line with the requirements of the UK adult social care programme ’Putting People First‘ – in particular, we needed to promote universal services and we needed to support self-funders.
• We needed to develop an online charging calculator that gave people an idea of how much their likely charge would be, if they received services from us.
• We needed an information hub that could be used by our own staff (and partner agencies like GPs and nursing staff) as a point of referral to our services.

We also completed a mystery shopping exercise with a group of customers on our old site and then took the learning form this to redesign the new site. This meant asking people to search for particular information whilst being timed. This turned up some interesting results: people sometimes spent up to 40 minutes struggling to find the information they wanted – and what they ended up with was sometimes just the PDF of a standard leaflet or advice that they should ring us at the contact centre!

We worked with our local voluntary sector partners to ensure that the new design of the website addressed the needs of our diverse customer base. Each of the major voluntary sector organisations recruited a number of testers to work with us in developing the website and we took heed of their feedback on layout, pictures and language. An editorial board of staff from all the service areas was set up to ensure we got the ownership of the operational teams. We worked with a copy writer to ensure the language on the site was accessible and did not present jargon or ‘expert speak’.

The site has been live now for over a year and has been received very positively by our customers and partner agencies. People are now accessing the correct information much more quickly than on the old website. We’ve also had interesting stories of relatives overseas using the website to register concern for a family member living in Stockport.

The feedback we have received – both positive and negative - has been used to redesign and develop areas of the site. An example is the feedback over images that might misrepresent a service.  We also changed some of the text on the site in response to direct feedback.

Providers listed on the site tell us they are now receiving direct contacts from service users. Feedback has been very positive and the site is being presented as a best practice example to other local councils in the UK such as Kensington & Chelsea. Some of these have developed the site themselves using the templates and design processes and concepts we developed, which we have made available as open source software.

Stockport Council's work to co-design their website has been included in the "Making Health and Social Care Personal and Local: Moving from Mass Production to Co-Production" publication. 

Below is a video interview with Jude Wells about the co-designing of the site that was taken at the Stockport Launch for the book.