We were invited up to Birmingham last week by NHS Birmingham East and North’s Social Entrepreneur in Residence, Eleanor Cappell.

Eleanor’s job is to find brilliant new ideas that address pressing health and social care needs in and around the Birmingham area.

And the Social Innovation Camp team was tasked with helping out by running a Social Innovation Camp Express with NHS staff, patients and carers from the local area.

The idea was to get them thinking about some of the challenges facing health and social care and turn those problems into positive solutions that harness the social power of the web.

And in just a few hours, here’s what our participants came up with:

Knowing You, Knowing Me

This idea started with the problem of how you might build better support networks for elderly relatives whose family don’t live locally.

Inspired by the way Facebook’s friend feed works and the success of Twitter, the team decided that the solution should be to build a tool that allowed NHS staff, family, friends and other carers to post short status updates about the person they were caring for to create a secure, real-time feed of an individual’s condition.

You could send updates by text so there would be no need to be online all the time, but you could also login to a website to go back and look over the timeline created to see how well someone was doing. This could engage a whole range of people in someone’s care by improving communications between them and also help paid carers who spend a lot of time taking calls from concerned relatives.

The idea shares similarities with previous Social Innovation Camp projects, Have-a-go-heros and the Good Gym.

And after the Express event, the team even came up with an even better name: Casebook - Facebook for case management!

A Spoonful of Sugar

At first glance, a nice neat problem and solution to tackle poor hospital food by creating a user-generated league-table: take a photo of your dinner, write a review and give it a star rating. The idea is to create a viral campaign naming and shaming hospitals into providing better catering for patients whilst celebrating those who do it well.

The challenge with this idea would be to overcome the institutional barriers to improving hospital catering: how supplying the food works, keeping costs low and organising it all so it doesn’t interfere with care.

But it’s something that really matters to patients and makes a huge difference to the quality of care - and recovery. And this campaign-based approach reminded us of the brilliant letter written to Richard Branson complaining about the quality of Virgin’s inflight menu. The letter became an email that spread virally across the world and led to its author being asked to help choose new food options for the airline. Perhaps a similar naming-and-shaming approach could help improve hospital food too!

Good food at home

Food was a bit of a theme for the evening: the next problem was about access to good-quality, home-cooked food if you’re unwell, but not in hospital.

The solution this team came up with was a text-based service linking those who can cook with those who need good quality meals in a local area. ‘Chefs’ could be families who cook a bit extra and deliver a portion round to a neighbour’s house. Or you could organise cooking groups at work and around local services such as a gym or doctor’s surgery.

Patrons for the service might be celebrity chefs, (the Hairy Bikers were the team’s first choice!), or the scheme could link with a local allotment provider.

The team were inspired by the success of We Are What We Do, an organisation encouraging individuals to make a small change in their lives to help others.

i_hate_my_mum.com / i_hate_my_daughter.com

The inspiration behind this idea came from a research paper which found that mothers of teenage daughters who fell pregnant didn’t talk with their children about relationships, sexual health or contraception. The research paper identified a need to bridge the gap between the two realities of the daughter and mother to prevent unwanted pregnancies.

The solution was to create a peer mentoring service using the web to connect teenagers with other mothers - a kind of ‘adopt a mum’ or ‘adopt a daughter’ service linking the experiences of both.

Click it, move it, do it together

Obesity in Birmingham is rising; reflecting a national trend in rising cardiovascular disease as more people lead sedentary lives.

Click it, move it, do it together is a social networking site to encourage competitive exercise in local areas. The idea is that you sign up to the site and link up with others in your local area to run, walk or play football. As membership grows, activity is rewarded by a local Primary Care Trust who might make facilities, such as local gyms and swimming pools, available to the most popular groups.

So what’s next for these five smart ideas?

At the end of the evening, we asked everyone to fill out a pledge card and tell us if they’d like to help Eleanor and BEN PCT take any of the ideas they came up with further. If you’re interested in getting involved, drop Eleanor a line: eleanor.cappell[AT]youngfoundation[DOT]org or follow her on Twitter.

You can see all of the other problems we came up with here and read more about how a Social Innovation Camp Express works here.

Last Wednesday, the Social Innovation Camp team headed off to Swansea for an Express workshop with the delegates from SOLACE Wales’s Innovate conference.

SOLACE is the professional society for senior strategic managers working in local government and they’d gathered to talk about different ways of delivering public services and how you go about making new ideas into real-world change.

SOLACE asked us to come along and help some of their members learn a little about the web and come up with some new ideas that used the social technology to tackle some of the problems they’d experienced in their local areas.

Armed with post-it notes and markers, our participants came up with sixty social problems they wanted to tackle and we chose just three we wanted to challenge them to turn from problems, moans and gripes into solutions.

And here’s what they came up with:

Oval-Teen

Our Social Innovation Camp Express participants might know all about social challenges in local areas thanks to their work in government, but our first problem came from one person’s personal experience when their son’s rugby team had no pitches to play on.

From this simple, small-scale challenge, this team chose to focus more broadly on how you get more young people involved in sport in a local area, using rugby as a starting point.

‘Oval-Teen’ is a site with three different elements to it: firstly, it’s a user-generated database of local community rugby teams which you can search based on your postcode and work out the nearest one to you. Secondly, once you’ve found a team, the site can help you manage your players and match schedule, a little bit like the events function on Facebook. The final element of the site is a user-generated map of available pitches. These might be professional pitches or school grounds - or simply park areas that could be used to play sport. As content is added to the site, Oval-Teen could become a campaign to get more and more organisations with space - such as local schools - to offer their pitches up for teams to use and include them on the site.

The team management element is a little bit like the tool Schport are building, but Oval-Teen would also be focused on surfacing demand for rugby teams and pitches in local areas; matching them with supply or highlighting where provision fell short.

Toothache.org

Our second team asked how they could make dentist appointments more flexible. At first glance, this is a tough problem to tackle from the bottom-up: surely the solution must start with the dentists who control the appointments system themselves? The challenge for Social Innovation Camp Express participants was to work out whether the web could play a role in putting power in the hands of service users to make the appointments system better.

With this as their starting point, the team identified two problems they wanted to tackle: firstly, that it’s difficult to find NHS dentists taking new patients and secondly, that patients are often allocated to dentists in an area that was difficult for them to visit on a regular basis. Toothache.org offered two solutions: firstly, it could be a user-generated map of where patients had found a surgery taking new appointments or where it was proving difficult to find an available dentists. The idea is to create a map of supply and demand for NHS dentists across Wales.

The second part of the site would allow you to swap your dentist with someone whose surgery was more convenient for you - whether that’s because it was closer to your work, your childrens’ school or a relative’s house. It’s a similar principle to that behind the vote-swapping campaign in the 2008 Canadian election where voters agreed to cast their ballots for each others’ favoured parties in different areas. The idea was to stop the anti-conservative vote being split between many different candidates in a local area and to increase the chance of any non-conservative candidate winning, whilst the overall votes cast for each party across the country remained the same. In Toothache.org’s case, at the point at which individuals had agreed to swap their dentists, the site would then have to gain buy-in from the dentists surgery to allow patients to switch, but it’s an interesting example of how the web could help service users to organise an element of service provision for themselves.

Get a life, get a lift

The availability of transport is a really pressing problem in rural Wales. ‘Get a life, get a lift’ is a lift-sharing scheme organised across a range of online and offline platforms - from the web, to mobile and text services, to simple community notice boards in a local area. The idea is to get local people who have their own means of transport to post up when they’re traveling, where and how much space they have. Others can then book themselves in for a ride.

Lift sharing would then be incentivised using a community credits scheme similar to that pioneered in Wales by Spice: for every lift you give, you receive credits which can be exchanged for local goods and services.

From 60 problems, our SOLACE participants came up with three back-of-the-envelope solutions - in just under two hours!

And now we’re looking forward to seeing if anyone takes these ideas away with them and develops them into real, workable projects.

We’ll be in Birmingham for our next Social Innovation Camp Express with the Young Foundation’s Social Entrepreneur in Residence on Wednesday 5th May.

We took our post-it notes off to the Design Council the other week to meet members of the London Collaborative network.

They’re a group of people primarily from local councils, but also from healthcare services, the police, social housing providers and other public bodies. The London Collaborative aims to facilitate connections and collaboration between senior people involved in delivering, planning and researching public services in London.

We were invited along to help them come up with new ideas that used web-based tools to get local residents creating solutions to local problems themselves.

The event kicked off with London Collaborative members sharing some of the issues they thought their local areas faced. From the fifty-odd they came up with, we chose four where we thought the web might be used to help citizens provide services for themselves in partnership with the state. Then we asked everyone to split into teams around our four ideas and work them up into solutions. Teams had to answer four questions:

1.) What’s the problem you’re trying to solve?

2.) What technology are you going to use to solve it?

3.) How will you sustain your solution?

4.) How will you get people to use your product or service?

They had to give each idea a good name and then pitch their solution to the group.

And here’s what they came up with:

Snow-Go

With London’s cold spell in the forefront of everyone’s minds, how councils grit pavements in ice and snow was a popular theme. The Snow-Go team wanted to make clearing paths and gritting roads into a competition between local residents: you enter by clearing your path, uploading a photo with date and time to a site which ranks you on a leader board against people in your local area and across London. For every road cleared, the council would agree to pay for more grit bins. The Snow-Go site would also feature a UK-wide weather map, snowman competition, grit-bin map and aggregation of Twitter posts with the #snowuk hash-tag as a crowd-sourced early warning system for bad weather. Gumtree and Freecycle would be integrated into the site for purchasing, swapping or sharing of snow-clearing equipment.

Adopt An Older Person

An idea to match up lonely, isolated older people who face barriers to leaving their homes with volunteers who can run errands or keep them company. ‘Adopt an older person’ would use a web platform to make it easy for volunteers to sign up and then bring them together with third sector organisations or care providers who look after older, vulnerable individuals to match them with someone to help in their local area. A skills-swapping element might be introduced whereby volunteers and older participants could teach each other cooking, sewing or how to use a computer.

Safer Crossing

The ‘Safer Crossing’ team were tackling the problem of badly placed pedestrian crossings. They argued that roads are primarily designed around cars and that crowd-sourcing information about the use of roads, pavements and crossings from local citizens would help make urban planning better. Safer Crossing is a site where you can offer suggestions for new pedestrian crossings or map dangerous parts of the road and the information would be fed back to the local council.

Our Space

Our Space matches people who want to hold events with vacant buildings or unused plots of land; it’s a user-generated search engine for physical space. As someone who knows where free space is, a local authority or a building owner, you can plot on a map where the available area is, what it could be used for and under what terms. Your space is mapped on Google Earth for people who are looking for a venue or plot of land to browse. It’s all about unlocking the potential of our local areas and under-used assets.

Not bad for under two hours work! You can see all of the challenges London Collaborative members came up with here and find out more about the network here.

We were up in Manchester last Wednesday for the second of our Social Innovation Camp Express events with the Department of Health’s Dignity in Care network.

Once again, post-it notes to hand, we brought together a bunch of people who are passionate about care and set them the challenge of coming up with some simple ways to make care better using the web - from understanding the problem to thinking about the technology they’d use to help solve it.

Two hours later, here’s what they’d come up with:

Dying to know

Whether you’re facing making end of life choices for yourself or a loved one, death is a difficult subject to talk about.

‘Dying to know’ is an idea to make information and support easier to access by creating a space for people to support each other online.

It’s taking the formula used by Net Mums and ShiftMS to help people find others who are going through similar experiences, and share their stories about very personal subjects anonymously and openly.

NHS Factor

What happens if you’ve got a good idea for how to make care better but you need a bit of cash to get it going? NHS Factor is a web-based competition to get more people thinking about care and give them some resources to make it happen.

You write up an idea or make a short film explaining what you need to make it happen and how much money you’ll be asking for. Then post it to the NHS Factor site for others to comment and vote. NHS Factor will give you a set of tools to help you campaign for votes using simple social media tools and set a time period for voting. At the end, the ideas with the most votes get the cash to make them happen.

It’s a little bit like Show us a better way or Teach us a lesson, but it’s not just for software and it’s specifically aimed at enabling small changes in health and social care.

NHS Factor would rely on a pot of funding being available for projects. However another suggestion was to follow the Kickstarter model where, instead of getting individuals to vote on projects, they pledge a small amount of money to make it happen so the cash comes from lots of different people, rather than just a central funding pot.

Face it together

Choosing the type of care that’s best for you is hard when you don’t know what the options are. The idea behind ‘Face it together’ is to match up people who’ve used services - whether that’s a residential home, respite care or home help - with those who have to work out what they need. People who are one step ahead in the care system can then act as mentors and advisers to those who are only just beginning to seek help.

The team behind this idea wanted to focus on how ‘Face it together’ might be of use to older people and so suggested that part of the project would have to involve helping this group access and learn how to use the web.

Where’s my bag?

Often, it’s the really small, simple things that make the biggest difference to care. This idea came from the simple need for clothes for patients who are leaving hospital and developed to focus on all the small but significant details a patient might want the staff caring for them to know - often a problem when people are admitted in an emergency and very little is known about their background or where they’re from.

‘Where’s my bag?’ is a site where you can upload a private profile with details about yourself that would be important for your care in hospital. This isn’t about your medical history, but rather details about what you like to eat, what you’d prefer to be called or who you’d like staff to contact on your behalf.

You can check out all the photos from both our Social Innovation Camp Express evenings in London and Manchester, together with a couple of short videos explaining some of these ideas here.

Last Wednesday saw the first of our two Social Innovation Camp Express events with the Department of Health’s Dignity in Care network.

We brought together a bunch of people who are passionate about care and set them the challenge of coming up with some simple ways to make care better using the web - right through from understanding the problem to thinking about the technology they’d use and how they’d sustain their idea.

Two hours later, here’s what they’d come up with:

Give us a break

There are around six million carers in the UK. Each and every one of those needs a break from time to time, yet getting a rest isn’t always easy. The idea behind ‘Give us a break’ is to match carers who need some time out with respite services for those they look after, as well as a nice B&B for them to stay in for a few days. It’s a simple idea to pinpoint hard-to-find resources and match them with localised, specialised demand - something the web does nicely.

How do I measure my recovery?

Data is a big issue in health care: who holds information about us, what would happen if we had more access to it and how is it used to keep us healthy? And it’s something that’s close to the heart of anyone interested in new technology that’s making it easier than ever before for us to gather, make sense of and share information about each other.

But it’s also useful for social care where tracking someone’s recovery, the progression of an illness or even simply keep an eye on the aging process can help ensure that an individual gets the support they need when they need it, rather than simply intervening at the point of crisis where need becomes apparent because it’s become acute.

Our team who asked ‘how do I measure my recovery?’ set about thinking how the web may offer ways to engage patients, families, carers and care providers in tracking care and sharing information collectively. Rather than focusing on getting care providers to release data they hold on those they can for, the team began thinking about how you could build your own record from scratch and share access with whoever you chose.

It’s a very similar idea to what Patients Like Me are doing in the US, where individuals can create their own health record, track their progress and compare it with similar patients.

I connect for you

Kind of like a dating site, but for your nan. As we age, we often become less mobile and more isolated. It becomes increasingly difficult to meet new people and make friends - especially if you’re in residential care and your family isn’t near by. This is a particular problem if you end up being cared for in a country where you don’t speak the language, as happens frequently in the UK where multilingual services aren’t always readily available.

So ‘I connect for you’ is an idea to match up people who are being cared for with others who have a shared background, language, interests or anything else that might be the beginnings of a friendship. The team wanted to get carers to upload the details of the people they care for - with their permission - using existing social networking software and assist in matching them with a friend to meet up with offline.

How does your garden grow?

The single most popular theme of the evening was the need to support staff within the care system. Poor management, recruitment and staff morale were all problems.

So who better to ask how to tackle this than the Dignity Champions we had in the room? Drawing on the idea that good practice can be grown from the grassroots upwards, they decided they wanted to create a series of hyper-local social networks using Ning and managed by care workers. The idea is to create a space for those who work in the care system - whether they’re staff in residential homes, doctors in hospitals or individuals caring for relatives - to talk to one another and share stories, as well as a way of organising to meet face to face. ‘How does your garden grow’ would ultimately aim to give individuals within the care system a voice and enabled them to create change for themselves.

Not bad for an evening’s work!

And we’re running the whole thing again on Wednesday 4th November from 6.30-8.30pm in Manchester at The King’s House Conference Centre, King’s Church, Sidney Road, M1 7HB

There are a few places left so get in touch if you’d like to come along.

One of the things that most inspires us at Social Innovation Camp is meeting people who’ve had personal experience of something they’d like to change.

So we’re pretty excited about two Social Innovation Camp Express evenings we’ve got coming up with the Dignity in Care Champions’ Network.

They’re a community of people who care about care: from those who work on the front line in hospitals and residential homes, to those who support friends and family members.

We want to know how the web can help make carers’ work easier, connect those being cared for and support their families.

Services like Patient Opinion, Shift MS and Enabled by Design are leading the way, but what will the future of care enabled by the web look like?

We want to take a bunch of people who know all about care, hear about their ideas, throw in some Social Innovation Camp magic and see what happens.

So we’ll be taking a really practical look at all this at two Social Innovation Camp Express evenings on the 28th October in London and the 4th November in Manchester.

All the details can be found in our upcoming events section.

Drop us a line if you fancy coming along.