Ageing Well Innovation Programme

The Ageing Well Innovation programme, backed by the ageing well team at Local Government Improvement and Development, is supporting local authorities to develop good places to grow older.

Our work includes:

Running action learning sets with over 30 Local Authorities across the country, from Dorset to Northumberland, to explore how they can approach issues around ageing more innovatively. This may be through radicalising the way statutory day care is provided, initiating local time banks to address isolation or developing business start-up opportunities for older people.

Compiling a report on the ten most promising ideas for local agencies in applying the Big Society ethos to older people's services (Watch this space)

Mapping a hypothetical journey of an older couple from the age of 60 onwards, ‘Charlie and Marie: A tale of ageing' which is a response to the interactions older people have with public services, particularly in relation to significant life events such as retirement or the birth of grandchildren.

Producing ‘User Journey Maps' to explore specific services in Cheshire and Redbridge, and how older people experience these services.

The intention is that each of these elements will help local government and its partners to think very differently about how they are delivering local services and to accelerate the development and adoption of more effective models of service delivery in older people's services.

Charlie and Marie: A tale of ageing

Our conversations with older people and service providers have culminated in an animation and accompanying narrative of a hypothetical couple "Charlie and Marie" and their journey from the age of 60 onwards.

Download a full pdf of the accompanying publication.

For more information please email ageingwell@youngfoundation.org.

User Journey Mapping

We spent time with Redbridge and Cheshire West to look at specific services, and explore how these are experienced by older people, through the process of User Journey Mapping.

User Journey Mapping is a visual technique used to track journeys of individuals through a service. This involves firstly working with professional staff to map all the different elements of a service chronologically - this essentially creates a blue-print pathway for the service. From here we speak with individuals and hear their individual story of their journey through the service.

These two different strands are then merged together to create a user-map - that is a visual representation of the service and how it is experienced by users. The tool works very well to identify what works well within services, as well as highlighting potential weaknesses and inefficiencies (which often result from a way of ‘silo-ed' way of working).

Our sessions were spent exploring the following services. Each name links to a map of that individual's journey through the service.