Establishing care principles that create a sense of home
Moving into residential aged care is a significant moment in the life of elderly people and their families. This project explored ways of protecting, nurturing and fostering a sense of home and self for people moving into and already living in residential care with Anglicare.
Anglicare was eager to further improve the environment and care they provide in order to create a greater sense of home for residents. Anglicare asked Craig Walker to research and develop design recommendations that could be implemented easily. We captured and amplified the voices and lived experiences of residents, identified a number of opportunity areas and created simple but effective design recommendations.
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The project in numbers
45Interviews with residents, staff and family
3Co-design workshops
30+Ideas formed from key opportunity spaces
Principles that underpin a homelike experience
Our research and conversations with aged care staff, residents, family members consistently surfaced four fundamental principles that are essential to creating more homelike residential care: familiarity, purpose, agency and respect. Together they provide a holistic foundations for the wellbeing of residents.
Research homes, from home
A COVID-19 lockdown meant that all communication and research was performed digitally over voice and video call. Despite the challenge in adapting, this way of working highlighted the importance of connection and communication for residents who are separated from family.
Capturing the voices of the people who matter
As part of this project, we developed a number of representative portraits involving residential care and retirement living residents as well as family and staff. These are anonymised reflections of real people we spoke with. The portraits primarily serve as a means of giving life to the voices of the residents. Each portrait is a powerful tool in conveying the thoughts and experiences of individuals and create a valuable asset in future iteration in projects around this topic.
Opportunity areas and ideation
Through research, we developed four major opportunity areas:
- Physical Space
- How I Spend My Time
- Thriving At Home
- The Organisation
The ideas developed within these opportunity areas aimed to prove design recommendations, ranging from extremely simple to complex and detailed. The team wanted to ensure a greater likelihood of uptake and provide immediate relief to some basic issues that can fundamentally change a person’s sense of home.
This is our FrameWork service in action
What we do:
We use existing content and research to help us form a perspective on the proposed CX, working through: