Mentoring The Royal Osteoporosis Society as they co-design peer support offers for under represented communities.
In 2023 The Royal Osteoporosis Society were awarded National Lottery funding to work alongside people with lived experience to co-design peer support offers.
The Osteoporosis Connect programme aims to offer peer-to-peer support to anyone living with the condition, providing a platform to share information, experience and give reassurance, no matter where they live. Support will be available in person and online, making it accessible for people with limited mobility, time and/or without a local support group.
Working with under represented groups.
The focus for the programme is to reach groups under served by existing support for Osteoporosis; people from South Asian communities, men, people living with Pregnancy Associated Osteoporosis and those living in areas of higher deprivation. There was also a focus on redeveloping the existing online community space. The aim was to provide a mix of online and place based peer support offers based on the needs of each community.
Providing an advisory service.
From the outset, we worked with ROS in an advisory capacity. This meant plugging in to their existing ways of working and providing advice and guidance as they designed and delivered the programme activity. Emma helped shape the overall co-design approach and provided guidance on how to flex for the different groups. She also joined sessions with the various co-design cohorts to provide feedback on facilitation and gather insights as a fresh pair of eyes.
Shaping the design of the approach.
Emma joined the programme when the work was just starting to take shape. Until this point the focus had been on securing volunteers to lead each stream of work and developing local relationships for the place based work. Emma worked with the programme to design a 5-6 session structure that allowed the team to move from building connection through to making tangible decisions together about the shape and format of a peer support offering for their community.
Running live tests.
As part of the three year funded programme, ROS is running live tests with each community to test and learn around approaches that have been co-designed with the communities they serve. These live tests will provide additional insights to help ROS refine the peer support offers before moving to offering longer term support for specific groups. Emma supported the design of this testing approach. Off the back of this testing, the Men’s Network is now live.
“We’ve found Emma’s support very valuable to our work. She is astute and perceptive, really understanding from the first moment what we needed to help progress things. She is also very pragmatic, recognising challenges and limitations to this kind of work, whilst helping us to keep things moving and get the most from the programme. She has really helped us in our thinking and approach and I would highly recommend her.”
ROS Client