User Research to Support Social Care Platforms Programme

Essex County Council is running a Social Care Platform Programme (SCPP) focused on the future of the platforms used by Adult and Children's Social Care and other corporate teams. An internal team is working to validate and prioritise the requirements for social care and other corporate teams.

To inform this work, we want to run some research to help us understand the experiences and needs of users. The audience groups that need to be considered for this discovery are:

• Service users
• Carers
• Care providers
• Partner agencies
• Other public/third partner organisations.

We would like to understand more about what people need, when they need it and how they're currently accessing this so that we can consider more efficient and timely ways to share information.

Insights from this discovery will be used to inform the strategic approach, design and requirements for the procurement of a future social care platform.

We want to deepen our understanding of the experiences of people that interact with our social care services, from residents to partner organisations. We are currently reviewing ECC's social care platforms and it is critical that our technology choices align with user needs and don't negatively impact people's experiences. At the moment, residents:

• Are not clear what support is available to them
• Access support late
• Have to repeatedly tell us the same information
• Can't easily understand their care plan.

Working with the supplier, we want to deepen our understanding of user needs to explore how our platforms can better support them.

We need to understand more about:

• the type of social care information people need, when they want it and how they want to access it
• the different channels that people currently use to access information and if this aligns to their needs and preferences
• the experiences of the other audience groups listed above and what their needs are

This work will help us to understand the impact that different social care platform solutions will have on users and allow us to make a more informed decision when reviewing potential platforms.