Working with Hospice UK: The PopNAT Process

Hospice UK, the national charity for hospice care, wished to develop a tool that could help better understand local needs and identify gaps in the provision of service in the delivery of end of life care. This tool would become a population needs assessment tool, or in short, PopNAT. After winning the tender to develop the tool for Hospice UK, we began to put the wheels in motion!

The tool, once complete, will support two of Hospice UK’s four key strategic objectives, which are to:

• Tackle inequality and widen access to hospice care
• Empower a strong dynamic and responsive hospice sector

The tool needs to provide actionable insights that hospice care providers can use to improve the range and scope of care they provide.

The Process

We began the process by conducting our own research into the hospice sector and some of the team spent a few weeks researching the key issues that hospice workers faced so we could clearly understand the key objectives for this tool. We took these findings to meet with a panel of hospice leaders, validating what we had found and absorbing everything we could from the real experts in end of life care.

Confident that we understood the issue, we began designing. The Gavurin Development team assembled for a two-week design sprint, with the aim of creating a prototype. This was an imaginative and creative process where we encouraged all team members to get involved and share ideas. We spent much time conjuring up many alternative solutions before narrowing it down, and we were clear on the design principles that were integral to every proposed solution:

• Trustworthy – users must feel like this is a system for them, and that it will be maintained with accurate and up to date data.
• Easy – it must be possible for the average user to pick it up quickly.
• Actionable – the system must connect data to action.
• Complete – the system must allow for deeper analysis.

Once a prototype was created, we demonstrated it to a few hospices, including St Oswald’s here in the North East, to collate more feedback and ensure that we were on the right track. After making some small tweaks and amendments, we were given the go ahead by Hospice UK to start turning the prototype into a fully-formed reality.

The next few months were spent crafting the tool ready to be displayed at the Hospice UK conference (#HUKConf2017). It was here that we demonstrated a fully working version to registered delegates and received feedback both offline and online!

The process after the conference was purely focused on ensuring things were just right. There were regular meetings between ourselves and Hospice UK to ensure we were on track and ahead of schedule and, as we move into February, we hope to see PopNAT launched very soon. The process has been both insightful and rewarding and we can’t wait to see the finished product!