Thrive by Design
Prior to the pandemic, mHabitat, now Thrive by Design, a self-funded inclusive co-design consultancy hosted by Leeds and York Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, delivered all of it’s services face to face, largely locally in Leeds and Yorkshire and Humber.
I joined in March 2020 and within a week we went into lockdown. This meant closing our venue, a digital health tech hub, and completely transforming our services. This could easily have led to the permanent closure of mHabitat. As a team of six and together with our partners we reviewed the changing external context and our own sense of purpose using the Japanese Ikigai model and answering these four questions:
What do we love to do?
What are we good at?
What does the world need?
(and because we are self-funded) What will people pay for?
From this process, drawing upon our collective skills, knowledge and experience, we pivoted our mission and launched a ground-breaking new social change programme; Inclusive Digital Transformation.
With a strong commitment to the principles of the NHS enshrined in the NHS Constitution, in particular, the provision of a ‘comprehensive service available to all’, we recognised that whilst the rapid digital transformation of health and care has been a herculean effort vital to meeting the challenges of the pandemic and the wider context (e.g. growing demands and scarcity of resources), there is a flaw in the plan. There are around 14 million people who are most likely to need health services (e.g. older people, people living with impairments and people who are living in poverty) who, for many complex reasons, cannot easily access digital services. Our social change programme offered to join forces with like minded people and organisations to run a discovery to find out how to co-design inclusion into digital transformation to avoid compounding pre-existing inequalities. We wanted to change the digital exclusion narrative to one that was about equity, about co-design and about tackling this as a complex system challenge. We were ambitious but did not really know how successful we would be.
Fast track to a year later, now with a team of 12 and a brilliant network of associates we have (mostly via digital means) ‘travelled’ the breadth and width of the country working with local and national partners ranging from supporting Norfolk and Waveney Integrated Care System taking a whole system approach to Inclusive Digital Transformation to working with arms length bodies like NHSX to map out what the current picture is across the country. We also worked with Professor Trish Greenhalgh and her Oxford University team on what inclusive video remote consultation looks like, NHS England and Improvement on a national mental health and digital inclusion programme and NHS Confederation on building digital skills in the mental health workforce.
It felt right that our brand and visual identity evolved with us to reflect the transformation of our operating model. We want to highlight the need to purposefully design services and systems which are inclusive and enable all people now and in the future to thrive. Our team reconceptualised our mission and felt that it is to help create a world where health and care is co-designed to enable everyone to thrive, so with this mission, and being a team of co-designers working with partners to drive the change, Thrive by Design was born.
Over the last 12 months we have had a positive impact on the NHS which we are so proud to be a part of, and ultimately on access to the NHS for people who have unfairly faced a triple whammy of health inequalities, Covid-19 and digital exclusion. Together with our many collaborators we have learnt so much about what good ‘inclusive digital transformation’ looks like but we have a long way to go to achieve our ambition.
We hope that our rebrand and new visual identity clearly defines us as being here to co-design inclusive health and care that supports people thrive through inclusion, innovation and improvement. We hope it will enable us to further our reach and influence to co-design more equitable health and care for everyone.
Thank you to all of our friends and collaborators.
