Surrey Heartlands is a regional integrated health and social care partnership in the UK which serves over 1 million people. The organisation partnered with Hellon to create a ‘participation game’ that can be used specifically in relation to a healthcare integration project to deliver a high-quality engagement plan that creates buy-in across the system, stakeholders and citizens.
A unique design game was co-created by defining the purpose and game activities in several workshops with participation from over 30 stakeholders, including citizen representatives. Over 6 months, Co-Lab was designed, tested and framed as a gamified project planning toolkit for delivering high-quality research based on a grass-root engagement model.
Co-Lab is run over three sessions that have specific objectives that support a team of seven participants in onboarding, planning, implementation of co-creation and follow-up. During the actual game session, the facilitator supports players through the activities on the game board. Co-Lab is unquestionably more diverse and inclusive, with staff and patients gaining a voice and a clear role in the process.
Due to highly successful test sessions for service development in a Women and Children Healthcare project in June 2019, stakeholders adopted Co-Lab across the organisation and in less than a year, the client applied Co-Lab to a range of diverse and complex healthcare projects that will impact thousands of regional service users, and there are plans to scale and digitise the game nationwide.
The game has already generated significant impact in many projects: Evidence shows that where Co-lab is applied, projects are more likely to see better budgets, impact and more equitable participation. The budget allocated to co-creation after the first Co-Lab session in a project gained a 1500% increase.
"The game was so well-received that we had to present it to other NHS Trusts and start using it in other regions. There was a point [before Covid] we couldn't keep up with demand to play the game"
