NHS Volunteer Responder program

The NHS Volunteer Responders service was designed in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Due to its outstanding success the service is being adapted so that it can continue having a vital impact in the long term, both on those in need and on the NHS and Social Care sector. Innovation Unit was brought on as design partner, and a bespoke methodology was co-created with wider stakeholders. We could see there were conflicting motivations causing tensions, and wanted to create a safe environment for exploring these barriers to innovating, and prototype to help the service transition between emergency response and business-as-usual. 

Using a combination of primary and secondary research, I led the work-strand which mapped the existing service to understand which parts of the service were working for which user groups, and why. 

With such a wide variety of stakeholders in this project, it was essential to manage relationships and dependencies carefully. I created a series of user journeys to play back some of the complexities and tensions we discovered. All stakeholders took part in generative prototyping activities, building understanding and buy-in for the work. 

Through the design process we co-created a shared vision and ways of working. Many relational concerns were voiced and resolved, and partners have a set of co-created values to use in navigating future tensions while working on this service.

Stakeholders agreed that the insights from the prototypes took into account different user needs as well as stakeholder constraints.  Many of these were able to be integrated into version 2.0 of the app prior to re-launch.

Our client was happy with our work, and based on the bottle-necks identified in the service mapping, has since commissioned additional service design work to examine the tensions between local and national provision of the service.