Designing an emergency response to COVID-19

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TLDR

  • Role — Service Design Lead
  • Date — 2020
  • Brief — Design and pilot a service that allows users impacted by the pandemic to get help from British Red Cross
  • Outcome —
    • A pilot then a national roll out of a service that broke silos within British Red Cross frontline staff to deliver help to over 50,000 people impacted by the pandemic
    • Service manual for frontline staff to support them with their onboarding
    • Bridged siloes between frontline teams through new ways of working

Challenge

British Red Cross volunteer delivering food to a user impacted by COVID-19
British Red Cross volunteer delivering food to a user impacted by COVID-19

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK, local organisations, British Red Cross existing service users and the public made a lot of requests to the British Red Cross for help. The Red Cross had to work at pace to find an approach that would bring siloed frontline teams together to deliver help for those impacted by the pandemic.

What we did

Working at pace, we co-created structure of the tactical cell, mapped the journey of how an individual request for help would be managed and delivered a pilot to test the service in a small area.

Service map illustrating proposed experience for a volunteer signing up to help
Service map illustrating proposed experience for a volunteer signing up to help
Snap shot of insights from user research testing service manual
Snap shot of insights from user research testing service manual

We delivered training to British Red Cross frontline staff to introduce them to new ways of working and onboard them into delivering help.

Iterated the pilot based on learnings from the pilot which lead to a national roll-out across the UK.

Designed, tested, iterated and developed a service manual for teams to support them with their onboarding and their new roles in delivering help.

Service manual for frontline staff deployed to respond to COVID-19
Service manual for frontline staff deployed to respond to COVID-19

Outcomes

  • Delivered new ways of working.
  • Digitised manual processes by introducing online forms which led to a reduction of time and effort. This helped teams track the progress of the requests.
  • Reached more than 710,000 people through our emergency response services
  • Supported 590,000 people at vaccination centres
  • Supported nearly 80,000 people with food deliveries
  • Made over 12,000 medicine deliveries to people who were unable to pick up their prescriptions
  • Helped 70,000 people get home from hospital.

What they said

“It was great to meet people from other services! We never had that chance before! I hope we can continue this cross-service collaboration after COVID19! I don’t know why we didn’t work this way before!” [British Red Cross Delivery Manager]

Further Reading

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