Public services

In the project, we have worked to understand how, why and when challenges appear, mapping out all the layers of the system; from the direct interaction between families and service providers all the way up to legislation, financing models, organization of the services and the collaboration and coordination between sector at all levels. The whole spectrum of public administration and service delivery has been used as design material to solve this wicked problem.

Families and their children with needs for complex services – often related to a combination of physical, psychological, and cognitive – experience significant difficulties receiving adequate support. Lack of coordination between sectors and public services providers results in families spending an average of 19 hours per week, coordinating the services. The project Alvorlig sykt barn (Severely ill child) aims to understand how and where problems occur and how they relate to each other, so we can find a way to offer families seamless, tailored, and reliable support across sectors.

A need for seamless and tailored support

Workshop

In the experimentation, we could take a step further – from the gigamaps to the real world to test a new way of collaboration across sectors and departments. This allowed us to test different interventions safely and quickly. 

Workshop vegg

2 bilder

Innovation in the public sector is complex, with numerous stakeholders at all levels of decision-making. We approached the problem through 

 to get past the initial threshold of fear of making mistakes. By designing and staging different scenarios, we used experimentation as a method to learn and gather new and deeper insights about the challenges. Staged scenarios offered a safe environment where we removed the real or imagined barriers of processes, protocols, and silos between departments. 

Experimentation

We summarised, visualised, and prioritised the existing challenges to make them clear and comprehensible. This, combined with the experimental approach of testing scenarios and solutions for collaboration, allowed us to identify no less than 45 concrete suggestions for projects that together can help create seamless and adequate support for the children and their families.

Experimentation and visualisation to map the challenges

By mapping the extensive knowledge the directorates already possess on the existing problems and working co-creatively with real users, we could summarise, visualise and prioritise the challenges. 

Problemområder som må løses

Tiltaksplan

The overview will facilitate staying on track when working on individual projects and enables tracking and measuring results, and facilitates the prioritisation of interventions. It's crucial to work on several parallel 

 to keep the focus where it should be – on the families.

Systemic Intervention

The Norwegian Directorate of Health has already started with the first of the 45 suggested interventions –"Rett på." This sub-project aims to make information about children's and young's rights more easily accessible. The Directorate of Health received 57 million NOK in June 2022 to improve access to information for families and their children and continue the effort within the life event.

Holistic public services for severely ill children