Supporting Rape Crisis to research and co-design ways to support people while they wait for counselling.
There are currently around 14,000 victims and survivors of sexual abuse on waiting lists that are in need of 1:1 counselling. This project worked to shine a light on this pressing issue while gathering best practice from Rape Crisis centres for how to manage waiting lists and co-designing ways to support people while they wait.
This project was delivered in partnership with Charley Pothecary at Inclusively. Illustrations credit: Emma Philip and Tyla Mason.
Pivoting the focus of the work.
Waiting lists are a systemic issue that a project of this nature was not going to solve. With the understanding that there needs to be system wide work to better understand and address this issue, we pivoted this work into a space that design led research and co-design could add value to. The focus became about gathering best practice from the 37 member centres to create a knowledge base around managing waiting lists, working alongside victims and survivors to co-design ways to better support them while they wait and wrapping all this up into a cohesive story that shines a light on the pressing issue.
Learning from frontline member centres.
The 37 Rape Crisis member centres around the country are automomus but struggling with the same challenges - waiting lists being one of their biggest. We attended the Rape Crisis national conference, ran a survey and discussion groups to hear first hand how frontline staff are managing waiting lists. We worked to gather best practice case studies from across the membership on both management of waiting lists and supporting people while they waited. A big part of this work was knowledge dissemination between the centres.
Supporting victims and survivors of sexual abuse to help co-design future improvements.
All centres were offered the opportunity to work alongside us on this project. Two centres came forward and we worked directly with them on the best way to involve their service users in the work. It was important to us that this involvement was reciprocal and designed with care to ensure the process did not cause harm or retrigger participants.
Through the course of the project we worked alongside three groups of people who had lived experience of sexual abuse. Working with pre-existing groups was important so that the relationships and trust were in place. We designed safe ways for people to share their experiences of waiting for support and worked together to develop early stage solutions for ways that Rape Crisis centres could better support people while they wait.
Telling the story.
A big part of this work was compiling the findings into a narrative that told the story of this system wide issue to funders and other people working within the system. Centering the voices and views of victims and survivors of sexual abuse was an important part of this story so that people further removed from the frontline were able to understand the real life impact of having to wait for support. By bringing together the wider context, data, experiences of staff and service users, together with possible ways forward, we were able to paint a picture a full of the situation and table evidence to inform commissioning moving forwards.
Outcomes.
The work provided a knowledge base for local Rape Crisis centres to draw on when managing their own waiting lists. It also tabled the starting points for better ways to support people while they wait that were co-developed with service users themselves. At a more strategic level it provided evidence to support commissioning at both a local and national level with a particular focus on ensuring the funding available is used in the best way possible to support as many people as possible.
“Emma is a joy to work with. She brings a deep expertise in service design and an enthusiasm for helping to make services better for the people who use them. She is communicative and thoughtful, and kept our projects on track throughout.”
Rape Crisis Client