click to view image
A study into how we could maintain our health status and manage long-term conditions, by involving friends and family through new and emerging IT applications.
As western economies struggle with escalating healthcare costs, there are growing calls for a paradigm shift from a system that simply treats patients to a model for health services in which the focus is on prevention rather than cure.
Within this context, there has been rapid growth in the market for self-monitoring and self-diagnosis products, whereby people take a more proactive approach to managing their own health. But, according to Helen Hamlyn Research Associate Indri Tulusan, there is also an ‘in between’ space between self help and the expert help of medical professionals. This is the social network of friends, family, work colleagues and neighbourhood facilities that operates alongside the healthcare professionals in helping us to maintain our health.
The project began with a cross-cultural analysis of individual attitudes to maintaining health by focusing on a user group of 20 people (ten in the UK, ten in India and Italy) who had recently moved to a new town or country, necessitating the creation of a new circle of care. Displacement was the key factor to get people to focus on the social relationships that support their health and a user research exercise invited participants to define their own circle of care on a glove.
The findings of this research revealed that people have three universal requirements to support their own health: fitness of body, autonomy of mind and relatedness to others. The study chose to explore this third aspect in greater detail, creating a Circles of Care map, which addresses health activities across the span of different life events, from childhood to old age via leaving home, marriage and having a family.
The study identified the main activators and patterns of behaviour within circles of care, such as family caring, partnering and friends coaching. From these insights, a series of eight service narratives were created which illustrate how the space between self-help and expert help can be populated with new services that activate the social network. Some services use network technology: Health Heritage Blog, for example, is an online family health diary that dispersed family members can access and contribute to wherever they are living in the world. A manifesto for change
The main output of the project is a publication, Circles of Care, available from the Helen Hamlyn Centre that sets out a manifesto for the Circles of Care model. This describes its main characteristics and the opportunities for creating new services.
Download Circles of Care (10.6MB PDF)
