A new approach to supporting people experiencing disordered eating
Helping people establish and nurture a healthy relationship with eating on their terms
Industry
Community Healthcare
Duration
8 Weeks
Deliverables
7x client focused insights
11x opportunity areas
5x north star concepts
1x service blueprint detailing a future vision of end-to-end service delivery
High level implementation roadmap
Impact
Transformed the service from a rigid, clinical approach into a model that meets people’s changing needs over time.
Outlined the future vision of the service using a well articulated human story and supporting roadmap to effectively communicate to funders.
WHAT was the problem
Disordered eating is a serious problem affecting a significant proportion of the community
An individual experiences disordered eating when they develop problematic eating behaviours that don’t quite fit a clinical diagnosis. It’s a huge, largely invisible issue in the community, with an estimated 12% of the population challenged by food and body image (Eating Disorders Victoria). While disordered eating may not present immediate physical health concerns, it’s one of the major risk factors for developing a more serious, clinically-diagnosed eating disorder (National Eating Disorder Collaboration, 2021).
An increase in disorder eating presentations and a high failure rate in our partner’s program
Our client, a Victorian community healthcare provider, saw an increase in disordered eating presentations as the state came out of Covid lockdowns. To address this need, they piloted a six-step program focused on early intervention. While they had some initial success, the team found that many participants were not sufficiently motivated to complete the program, resulting in a high rate of drop-outs.
WAVE was brought on to review and redesign our client’s approach to supporting people across the disordered eating/ eating disorder spectrum by taking a ‘fresh look’ at the problem space from the end user’s perspective.
Our mission was to:
Reduce barriers to engaging with early interventions around disordered eating.
Create a blueprint for a service to allow people to establish and nurture a healthy relationship with eating on their terms.
Build confidence and tangible next steps towards creating such a service for our client.
APPROACH we took
Identifying key factors to success
At the start of a project, we looked for a core tension that would help reframe the challenge. As we worked with stakeholders to gain an internal view of the disordered eating pilot, we noticed something interesting. While the pilot objective was to create opportunities for ‘early intervention’ in disordered eating, the current approach relied on finding participants who were highly motivated to address their mental health. We wondered: how easy is it to be highly motivated if you’re only in the early stages of presenting symptoms? Clarifying what ‘early intervention’ and ‘motivation’ looked like from a participant-perspective was quickly identified as key to success.
Understanding from a place of safety
To understand the experience of disordered eating, and what support looks like for people challenged by it, we conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with people at various points in their healing journey.
Because it was likely our research would touch on difficult emotional experiences for our participants, our planning placed strong emphasis on participant safety. This involved enabling the participant to be active in shaping the discussion and setting boundaries throughout the course of the interview. Approaches included using images as prompts to let them voluntarily explore their experiences and responses safely and encouraging participants to pause or shift the conversation at any point.
Making sense of things
Our research gave us seven key insights about what it feels like to grapple with disordered eating. These covered three main areas:
What’s in my head: the internal experience of disordered eating
What’s happening around me: the external factors influencing how someone responds to these feelings
The Journey: how both these elements play out over time as people move towards healing.
Designing possible futures
Our next step was to collaborate with our client to respond to these opportunities in order to imagine the future of care they could provide for people experiencing disordered eating.
Starting with a design workshop, we created a range of high level “North Star” concepts. A North Star creates a vision of an ideal future state from which to backcast – or reverse engineer – steps to achieving this future for the end user across short, medium and long-term scenarios.
Our concepts were focused on:
creating space for the individual from the day-to-day stress of disordered eating in order to gain a new perspective on it
involving non-clinical aspects of support, to build trust in, and complement clinical approaches
activating strong support networks based on existing relationships and others with lived experience
allowing for fluid entry points into support whatever the stage of the journey an individual finds themselves in.
Making sure it would work - feasibility and viability
North Star concepts can feel like a giant leap for some stakeholders, because they represent future thinking that is led by end-user desirability rather than by today’s implementation and costing assumptions. To address this concern we undertook a feasibility and viability analysis that showed how key elements of the concepts could be developed to have immediate impact, while meeting existing constraints and providing valuable learnings for the organisation.
VALUE we created
Transforming the service from a rigid, clinical approach into a model that meets people’s changing needs over time.
Key in our research was illuminating what care looked like for people experiencing disordered eating beyond a clinical view of interventions. This enabled us to design a broad ecosystem of concepts that detailed a range of social, emotional and behavioural supports, including dedicated community spaces, online tools and engagement of peers and family.
Ultimately, these concepts formed a foundation of understanding, engagement and positive experiences upon which clinical interventions could be layered to create better, and holistic health outcomes.
EMPOWERMENT we embedded
A compelling narrative to take the work forward and actionable next steps
When we hand designs over to our clients to lead next steps internally, we make sure to set them up with a compelling narrative that speaks to the impact of the new approach. In this project, we did this using a Service Blueprint, which followed a fictitious character as they engage with different aspects of the solution across their journey.
This not only gave detail to how our concepts would work together, but also surfaced the emotional quality that would help our client sell the vision and secure buy-in for further development. The blueprint, along with an implementation roadmap, was used to inform funding applications to move the project into delivery.
Project Reflections
Often healthcare design starts with best practice clinical interventions and fits these around capability and cost assumptions. Patient experience is a by-product of these decisions, and isn’t necessarily given the attention it deserves. Often clinicians delivering services are required to take the initiative to incrementally improve things, but this generally falls flat when so much of an experience is embedded at the system level.
Our approach here started by gathering clear insight into the desired patient experience by examining what meaningful care and support looks and feels like for them. From there it was possible to layer on the necessary clinical frameworks to ensure holistic care.
- Will | Senior Service Designer, WAVE
Client Reflections
“Working alongside WAVE to better understand how we could design a service to support people experiencing disordered eating was really valuable because they brought an 'outside-in' perspective to our model of care.
They demonstrated great ability to listen to people's stories and were able to bring the learnings and insights to life, ensuring the client's voice was always present and top of mind. This evidence-based thinking helped us to move forward with greater clarity and confidence that the service we were designing was aligned with our clients' needs.”
- Manager for Innovation & Design | Health Provider
Will Farrier has designed for healthcare, aged care, financial services, insurance and start-ups, including helping to build the global ethical fashion platform Good On You. At WAVE, Will uses his skills as a facilitator, researcher and designer to help clients tackle big challenges by thinking differently.
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