Testimonial: Irish Heart Foundation
Studio Notes | What We’ve Been Up To
This breaks the mould from our usual posts, but we recently received the following note from Helen Gaynor, Head of Community Services at Irish Heart Foundation. Helen was the client lead on our recent project with the Irish Heart Foundation Patient Services. Patient Services are a vital support to patients and carers all over Ireland who have been affected by stroke, heart failure, and heart disease through a number of services.
It’s lovely to get this kind of feedback from a client, but also great to see such a strong case being made for the use of the service design approach in the digital transformation of services.
Helen, and the Irish Heart Foundation have kindly given us permission to share this note.
The Irish Heart Foundation patient support department commenced work with Context Studio in October 2022. The brief was to map out how the patient support service worked in its current state and use a service design approach to increase efficiencies and ultimately improve all aspects of the service delivery, as well as inform the decision-making process for our future patient crm needs.
We deliver a national blended service of digital, phone and face-to-face supports across a huge community of people living with heart conditions and stroke that has grown significantly since COVID-19.
The systems and processes we had in place were no longer working for us as they were implemented at a time of rapid change and to meet an urgent need. We now needed to be sustainable and ensure we had our processes as efficient as possible.
The Context Studio team researched, collaborated, and co-designed with our members, volunteers, and staff, skilfully drawing out key service innovation concepts and educating us simultaneously. They also confirmed what we already knew – our staff is our superpower. But they needed improved systems to sustain and support them in the valuable work they do.
John and his team delivered powerful keys insights that can be implemented immediately as “low hanging fruit” and in the longer term to increase the quality of service delivery and inform our crm needs.
Context Studio were a pleasure to work with; highly collaborative, innovative, and excellent communicators. The whole team benefitted immensely from this process.
Any service planning to deliver a service of innovation and excellence really can’t afford not to do this piece of work. I would highly recommend Context Studio and look forward to working with them again in the future.
Helen Gaynor
Head of Community Support Services
