Care Connect is a not-for-profit organisation that provides advice, guidance and coordination of in-home services to support people to live at home, connect to their community and give their carers a break.

They predominately support consumers in aged care, those with a disability and in transition from hospital to home.

The transitional care market represents the opportunity to align with the aged care market, as a hospital stay can be the first entry point for older people requiring aged care advice, guidance or service support.

Vision

To be the first choice for people seeking connections to care, support and community.

Quality independent advice and services that enable people to live happily at home for life.
- Care Connect

• Understand and map the ideal transitional client experience along the service continuum
• Uncover gaps and identify opportunities across the end to end ComPacks experience
• Map the ideal experience from both CareConnect and the customer’s perspective

• Timeline and project management documentation
• Research brief
• Agenda for staff workshop
• Sketch of current service blueprint

Key opportunities identified from research:

• Improve client experience with a more flexible and ongoing service offering
• Free up CAs time to provide more ongoing service
• Ensuring Service Provider quality and consistency
• Communication across the service spectrum
• Implement single back-end system to create efficiency
• Communicate additional Care Connect offering
• Cost issues

Our approach is to use Symplicit’s customer-centred design framework that has been used successfully for Care Connect on other projects. We will ensure an innovative application of the framework, moving to a digital solution where possible, and ensuring customer outcomes that lead to good health.

Symplicit will undergo research with all the relevant stakeholder groups and end users of the service. We will synthesize this research to provide Care Connect with insights and recommendations for providing an optimal service for customers.

We will also map the research findings to our Customer Value Proposition canvas to ensure a clear understanding of what transitional clients truly value.

How might we optimise the Care Connect ComPacks service in order to ensure adequate advisory time and a quality service is provided to the client while ensuring cost and KPI targets are met?

Client advisers & social workers

• Explore current state of the ComPacks service
• Staff pain points, gaps and dependencies
• Cross business experience between the hospital staff and Care Connect staff
• Where on the ground staff see areas of opportunity
• Understand what is or isn’t working with ComPacks program

The customer experience

• Overall, explore what did and didn’t work and how could key areas be improved
• Impression of the Care Connect service from in hospital to ComPacks completion
• What could be improved and why
• What customers struggled with before, during and after ComPacks
• What additional services need to be considered to have a positive impact and increase advocacy

Findings

• Clients can be overwhelmed
• Ongoing quality advice is critical
• Patient needs are unique and can change over time
• Client is unlikely to provide feedback
• ComPacks is a preferred service because its reliable
• Referral process is inconsistent
• Interaction with Care Connect is positive  
• Social workers also want feedback on patient progress
• The LHDs are committed to providing a quality service
• CAs have significant pressures that impact their ability to provide ongoing advice to clients
• CAs have challenges just getting through an assessment
• Intake’s process is very manual
• CFs have a manual process and have little visibility of the services they are managing
• Limited choice of service providers and lack of feedback

Pain points

• Lack of time to provide advice client needs
• Lack of service quality and service providers
• Communication between different groups
• No universal system makes for a lot of manual work