Commissioning scenarios
DB2
A co-created content-led service for diabetes
The management of chronic health problems and the promotion of healthier lifestyles is one of the biggest challenges facing the UK and one where Public Service Broadcasters have played a campaigning role. But health is also an area where the new, participative PSP approach could make a real difference: empowering mixed communities of professionals and users to create content and services that share knowledge and develop new strategies for managing health.
DB2 is a PSP project to test this approach - providing a content-led service to help people live well with diabetes. It is a model for the co-creation of new services and illustrates the difference between the PSB approach of making content about an important issue to the PSC proposition of creating content-led services with and for the people involved.
During the DB2 trail in Bolton (where 10% of households have at least one diabetic) service design and production company Red:Pink worked with diabetics, their families, carers and health professionals to create an online community where they could share solutions to common problems. Content in the form of written posts, photographs, videos and podcasts were uploaded by patients themselves, their families, nurses, doctors and diabetes specialists. People facing similar issues supported each other through the platform, and people who have overcome particular problems can share their stories and advice with others. A ranking system allows the community to decide what is most relevant. One of its early successes was an instructional video created by a patient and nurse team as to how to get the best out of your diabetes consultation, that now forms the basis of the NHS's best practice guidelines.
Following the trial the DB2 platform will be opened up nationally with new clusters across the country creating innovative new services, content and tools. Those currently in beta include:
- An online application that allows you to analyse the nutritional content of food shopping services and a mobile application that allows you to do the same when you're in the supermarket
- A collaborative cooking service for families to partner-up to cook meals - locating other volunteers via DB2's postcoded database.
- A regular hosted forum for newly diagnosed diabetic teenagers
- Online progress tools that allow users to track over time actors most relevant to them.
DB2 is a thriving community which now provides much of the informational content on diabetes management to local health trusts as well as specialist advice and research for broadcasters and other media channels. After three years support from the PSP its also well on the way to being self-financing having gained support from both the health and food retailing sectors.
Broadcasters commission a wide variety of factual, campaigning and lifestyle programming about health issues. From the Fat Challenge to Too Fat to Walk. But even as campaigns, the impact of these programmes is inevitably short lived. Chronic and serious health issues like diabetes and cancer are avoided by commissioners. The interested audience is perceived to be small and the wider audience thought to find the issues depressing and intractable. The PSP approach is to serve those users with an ongoing need, not to make programmes about their problems for an audience of others.