Personas for innovating in adult social care

Introduction

The general consensus is that innovations spread slowly in the adult social care (ASC) sector and, when they do spread, there are many implementation problems that affect the extent to which innovations achieve scale within different geographies, continue and become part of routine practice. It appears that personas — a method from design research – could be a valuable tool for innovating organisations to guide their decisions and actions around collaboration. A persona is a fictional character that represents a type of customer of the product (here: an ASC innovation stakeholder). The fictional character is created based on a synthesis of what is learnt through research with real stakeholders about the themes or common characteristics shared by some of the stakeholders. The aim is to gain a better understanding of stakeholder’s needs, behaviours, experiences, and goals, in this case with respect to supporting their work around innovation. The aim is to develop personas that will be acceptable and useful to stakeholders involved in developing, implementing and seeking to sustain ASC innovations or supporting this process. This work will be co-funded and supported by an ongoing ESRC-funded study on innovations in adult social care.