PREVENTATIVE APPROACHES IN HACKNEY
PROBLEM
Covid has exacerbated existing issues faced by people living in Hackney, as well as creating new ones. Social distancing and longer-term economic consequences have impacted people who are already disadvantaged, women have been more likely to be furloughed or made redundant, there is a higher rate of deaths due to Covid among older and Black and Asian residents, and the economic and social impact has been heightened by austerity.
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Reactive ways of working mean that people often slip through the net and reach crisis, when something could have been done far earlier to support them.
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During the pandemic, Hackney Council set up a Covid Helpline that began supporting residents who were told to shield. Staff who had previously worked on the repairs and housing call lines were retrained to have holistic conversations with residents, while daily targets were taken away so people could take their time supporting each person.
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But with life returning to some normality, we're at risk of old ways of working setting in.
SOLUTION
In January 2021, two colleagues and myself set up a fortnightly forum open to all Council, voluntary and healthcare staff to discuss preventative ways of working, and to develop models that could embed this way of working.
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To support preventative ways of working, we need to focus on building relationships across the system, providing professional and emotional support for staff, and untangling the complexity of referral pathways so that people only have to tell their story once.
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We developed three strands to test: peer support, a digital tool to aide holistic conversations and referrals, and Link Work.
LINK WORK
PEER SUPPORT
BETTER CONVERSATIONS DIGITAL TOOL
LINK WORK
I facilitated a codesign group of frontline practitioners from across the Council, voluntary and health sectors to understand the problem of referring people across the system. Through research with residents I found a key insight: it takes a huge amount of courage to ask for help, and if trust is broken, it can be very difficult to re-engage with services. Agencies external to the Council also mistrust it, as they often don't hear back about referrals.
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The solution we chose to test was Link Work - a relational, intensive Customer Service team who spend time building trust, understanding the full extent of people's problems, navigating services and linking people to named officers in the right team.
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I piloted the Link Work approach with two Customer Services staff in May-June 2021, supporting 42 vulnerable Hackney residents, and I am now setting up an ongoing service from September with staff seconded from across Customer Services teams. This includes developing a secondment process, induction and training and building connections with internal and external teams.
The service has built stronger relations with the voluntary sector, is fully owned by the Customer Services department, and gives those seconded into the role intensive training and an approach they can take back into their regular roles.
PEER SUPPORT
Few customer services teams have supervision or dedicated support time, yet they frequently have distressing calls and speak to Hackney's most vulnerable residents.
I set up a 6-week pilot of weekly peer support sessions with two groups: one from the Council's Covid Helpline, and one with a mixed group of professionals from the Council, charities and health sector. The groups were facilitated by myself and a Social Care practitioner. We are now hiring a facilitator to further iterate the model so that it can be sustainable and scaled across the borough.
BETTER CONVERSATIONS DIGITAL TOOL
There are thousands of services for residents in Hackney, but most frontline practitioners refer people to a handful that they know of.
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Better Conversations is a digital tool available to all frontline workers across the borough, acting as a resource to quickly find relevant services.
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I led on the user research, user testing and UX and overall service design of the first phase of this work.
"The person we're working with said how grateful they were to be put in touch with a Link Worker. They'd been waiting months for an Occupational Therapist, and now they're getting the support they need."
Frontline practitioner, Shoreditch Trust (Voluntary & Community Sector)
IMPACT
We are working in partnership with Newham Council and UCL's Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose to evaluate this work, including training that Newham has set up which looks at how to recognise red flags while on the phone with residents and how to ask questions to understand their context so that they can direct them to support early on.